


Static and Salt

by Splintered_Star



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: C-PTSD, Discussion of Torture, Dissociation, Dreamsharing, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force-Sensitive Finn (Star Wars), M/M, Mild Sexual Content, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, Unreliable Narrator, abuse recovery, discussion of dehumanization
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-30
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:00:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 46,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21596542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Splintered_Star/pseuds/Splintered_Star
Summary: The Resistance has escaped the siege at Crait, but Finn still feels pursued wherever he goes in this new life he does not understand.Across the Galaxy, Kylo Ren is being haunted.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Finn/Rey (Star Wars)
Comments: 51
Kudos: 37





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I have been wanting to write this story since I walked out of tfa, never quite managed it until now. 
> 
> Shout out to heyktula, nenya85, and counterpunches for being some of the best cheerleaders ever.
> 
> a note on the ships: finnrey is present, though a subplot. the kylux... it's more accurate to say this is written through a Kylux lens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> specific warnings in the end notes

Sand covers every surface, shifting unsteadily under Finn's feet.

"Here we are," General Organa says, sweeping sand off of a table and leaning against it. "A wretched hive of scum and villainy." One of the survivors snorts. Finn isn't sure why. The landing bay they've touched down in, shuffling out of the Falcon into a room only remarkable for its size and its emptiness.

Finn doesn't know where they've landed. He doesn't know what they're supposed to do now, with so few people willing to fight. He's not sure how long he's been awake, Canto Bright and the Supremacy and Crait and the escape blurring together. HhHe still tastes salt.

The General glances over them all, and Finn does not know what she sees when she looks at him.

“I will fight the Order to my last breath." She says. "That is my choice, but not one that I will make for anyone else. The Rebellion has always been and will always be a volunteer army. If you want to leave, you are free to take the next ship off. If you want to stay, you are welcome.”

No one moves. Finn thinks longingly of running to the unknown regions with Rey, starting a life where no one is looking for them. Then he shoves the thought down, guilty for his longing.

General Organa nods. "Thank you, everyone. It will be a long fight, but Force willing we will win it." She waves a hand out. "3P0, wake R2. Rey, you're the most familiar with desert life. Do a sweep of the building - there should be water condensers along the outside walls, but I don't know if they're still active. There might be a well somewhere. Chewie, take first watch. Everyone else, get some rest. Hello R2.” She smirks at the droid beeping slowly. “Let’s see which of my shelled bank accounts are still active, shall we? Start with the ones on Correlia.”

The place they landed isn’t a military base, or at least Finn doesn’t think so: there are rooms covered in rich fabric caked in dust, basements full of droid scraps or massive bones of something long dead. He gathers that they’re on Tatooine, Luke Skywalker’s birthplace, but nothing more and he doesn’t know why they’re here.

R2D2 has a map of the area. Finn decides not to ask why. He just moves things where people tell him to, scavenging materials and cleaning spaces. Finn has rust and dirt under his fingernails at the end of every day. He’s not used to it. He’s still not used to having his hands exposed at all.

Finn finishes his work for the day, helping Rey sort through the old machinery left by whoever lived here before. She smiles at him as he stretches out, but doesn't get up herself.

"Don't stay here too late," he says, and it makes Rey smile wider.

"I know! I'm almost done checking the wiring on this engine." Finn tilts his head at the machine Rey has spent twenty minutes investigating - it doesn't look like an engine, but he supposes she would know. "I'll be done by the time you're back from the med center."

Finn feels his cheeks heat at being predictable and rubs the back of his head. "Okay."

The area claimed as a med center is a ten minutes' walk from where Rey was working. Finn walks the dark twisting halls with tension between his shoulders, hyper aware of his footsteps echoing in the silence. There are so few of them and so much space that it feels empty, like he’s somewhere he isn’t allowed.

He keeps expecting to be found, to hear an Officer's footsteps or see Phasma come around a corner. By the time he reaches the med center, nothing has happened, but the tension hasn't faded.

"Hello, Finn." The medic, a human Finn doesn't know very well, smiles at him. "Rose is still recovering. She should be ready to wake up soon."

Finn opens his mouth, and then closes it and nods. He doesn't know how long people take to recover from injuries like this. He had been in a bacta suit for three days, but Rose doesn't have one of those and her injuries are different. A trooper who injured themselves the way Rose did wouldn't be allowed back to their squad without a round of reconditioning, if they were allowed back at all. Finn has no idea how long it should take, and he doesn't know if the medic is lying to him.

It would be easier if he could see her, but there's no way the medic would allow that.

So he tries to smile the way the medic smiled at him, and goes back to find Rey again.

The compound is huge, and already has living quarters with individual 'freshers. There are enough rooms for everyone in the Rebellion to have their own without sharing.

Days later, and Finn still isn't comfortable in his. He's never had this much space to himself before, and keeps waking up expecting his squad mates to be around him. There's even a door, with a mechanical lock. Every day after the end of his shift, his fingers hover over the latch that would lock everyone out of his room.

There is a part of him that wants to hide and make sure no one can find him. He wants to disappear. But he's going to help the Rebellion, and that means no selfishness, no self-interest. He'll give all of himself up to make sure others are safe.

Each night, his fingers hover the latch and then fall away without turning it.

Rey knocks on his door after dinner one night, and when he lets her in sits across from him on his bed. She smiles at him, a little stiff. Finn appreciates it. He’s pretty sure his smiles don’t look the way they’re supposed to either. It’s easier when he feels like they’re learning together.

“Finn.” She opens her mouth, then gives up and reaches over to grab his hand. Her skin is cool, unused to the dark tunnels, but touching her makes him feel warm. He holds her hand back, because - he thinks this is one of the things that people do, when they care about each other. He saw Poe grab the General’s hand, when she was hurt. Rose grabbed his hand. He thinks he saw officers hold hands, before, once or twice, but he’s not sure.

“Rey.” He swallows. “I’m - glad you’re okay. After everything.” It’s stupid. He feels stupid for saying, again, when it was one of the first things he said to her when they were out of range of the Order. But it’s the only thing he can think of right now.

She stares down at his hands, and smiles a little wider, a little - shocked, he thinks. Surprised, but in a good way? He’s not sure what it means. People use their faces so much more than their bodies, here, and he isn’t sure what it means. She rubs their fingers together and looks up.

“I’m glad you’re okay too.” She swallows. “I think - I think I’d know, if something happened to you, but. I’m glad you’re okay.”

Skin contact is - it’s something. It’s a /lot/, and sometimes it’s too much. He’s flinched away from Poe clapping him on the shoulder, and he’s still hyper aware of every inch of skin not covered by armor - but he thinks Rey might be the same way, or - she understands, at least. She flinched away from Poe too, he thinks, didn’t want Finn to take her hand when they first met.

Right now, it’s okay. Right now it’s just - warm.

Now he’s the one staring at their hands.

“Look, I want to -” She pushes her hair out of her face, frustrated. “I think you - I mean everyone can, but - I think you’re Force sensitive. I think we have a Force bond. ”

He opens his mouth to deny it, and then closes it again. He doesn’t deserve anything like that. But Rey would know, and he doesn’t want to disagree with her.

“...Okay.” He nods. “Do I-”

“You don’t have to do anything!” Rey jumps in. Maybe they do have a bond, like she said, the way they complete each other’s thoughts. Finn finds that he likes the thought, a little bit - and then thinks “like a squadmate” and that’s not okay. He’s not supposed to miss that. “I just wanted you to know, in case you feel things through the bond. And - if you want to learn with me, from General Organa.”

General Organa rooting through his head sounds - like torture. His every thought, his every flaw, every weak and broken part of him exposed to her blaster-point stare?

Maybe she senses his hesitation. She squeezes his hand, once, and - disappointment, he thinks, that’s what her face is showing. He swallows.

“I- I’ll think about it.” He should be better. He should be willing to face anything to make her feel better, and he is, he is - but. Like this, where she’d have to see him afterwards, would find out exactly how worthless he is - it was easier piloting into the cannon, knowing that he would die and then no one would see him anymore. It wasn’t a responsibility, like using the Force is. He wouldn’t have to deal with the aftermath.

He squeezes back, and hopes it’s enough.

  
  
  


Now that he’s watching for it, Finn notices the Force everywhere. He always knows where Rey and Poe are if he thinks about it, and General Organa is a signal fire on the edge of his awareness. He always knew when Slip was falling behind without looking back, or when the Officers were watching them train.

He stands suddenly from his spot in the mess one day, and at first he isn’t sure why, until -

It’s like - a visor display flickering on, a radio signal fuzzing in and out in his helmet. Except he isn’t wearing his helmet anymore. He stares across the base, eyes going unfocused - or, focusing on something that he can’t quite see -

Across his vision, or across the visor display that isn’t there, he sees General Organa’s laser of attention sweep out. Then -

“Finn.” He jerks, startled out of whatever - fugue he’d fallen into. She nods in the direction of the med bay. “Rose is waking up.”

Finn swallows, and goes.

  
Finn makes it to the medbay by the time Rose wakes up, among the crowd of people clustered around her bed. He wants to – ask her so many things. He wants to get to know her for real, the way he’s getting to know Poe and Rey. He wants to ask why she pushed him out of the way of the cannon. He wants a lot of things that he doesn’t have words for.

But there’s a lot of people, and he doesn’t know what to say, so he just – tries to smile at her, and she smiles back, and that’s something.  
  
  


“Hey, buddy, growing your hair out?”

Finn blinks at Poe’s casual question over lunch and touches his hair absently.

He knew, abstractly, that hair grew longer. He'd seen officers' hair get longer and shorter and then longer again. But stormtroopers always had their hair cut on a schedule, and Finn realizes suddenly that he's never gone this long without it being cut. He hadn't thought about it.

But that isn't the response Poe is looking for, asking him casually like he expected Finn to have an answer. Is there a regulation Finn is missing? It always starts that way, after all, hints that you’ve stepped out of line before the reprimand is official.

“Oh, I guess it is getting long.” Finn hedges. Better that than admit his failure at independent life. 

Poe grins, and Finn knows he's passed as a functioning person. "Hey, if you need help cutting it, let me know!" Poe winks, waving his chopsticks around in the shape of a head. "The back parts can be a pain to do on your own. Unless you can hold clippers with the Force, maybe..."

Finn nods, but doesn’t answer, and the conversation drifts.

After Poe leaves, Finn tugs on the too long strands and - thinks. The sonics tangle his hair and dry it out, and that doesn't seem to happen to anyone else, and he’s not sure what to do with it. He should have it cut, just in case it is a regulation.

They don’t have a lot of down time, except when they do. Finn isn’t used to it, isn’t used to every moment scheduled for productivity. If he’s left without something to do for too long he starts pacing, or tugging on his nails. He feels useless and he hates it.

But right now, even though he is waiting for orders, he does not feel useless. He’s sitting in one of the less dusty places in the base, an alcove on the side of the shipyard. Rey sits across from him, one hand wrapped around his.

“I went to Luke’s island.” She rubs her thumb over his knuckles, smearing grease around. It feels nice. “I’m sorry I had to leave you behind.”

He feels her regret and then sees the matching expression on her face.

“It’s okay, I understand.” He mimics her movement. He doesn’t know if it means anything in particular, but Rey likes it, so maybe that’s enough. He smiles awkwardly.

“I can’t believe we almost ran into each other on the Supremacy,” he mutters. He’s heard the story from Chewbacca, but not - “Why were you even there?”

Rey leans against his shoulder. He blinks at her but - let her do it. She’s not looking at him.

“....I had. Visions. Or something like that.” She shakes her head. “Kylo Ren and I.” Finn stops breathing for a moment, and then starts again. “We had been...linked, in the Force. I went to him.” She shakes her head, suddenly annoyed, but he can tell she’s angry at Ren, not at him. “I thought he needed my help.”

Finn’s chest fills up with some emotion, warm and fond. He can’t even get angry at her for doing something so reckless. Maybe it spills over through the Force. Rey looks over at him, confused.

“You -” Finn swallows, unable to find the words. “You always want to help people. Even when it’s dangerous.” Rey huffs at him, but he can feel that she’s not really upset. This is so much easier than trying to interpret faces. He smiles, and squeezes her hand. “I don’t think we would have met if you didn’t.”

Rey leans into his shoulder and squeezes his hand back. “I like you better than Ren.” She mutters into his arm, and Finn can’t help but laugh.

After the evening meal one night - and those take some getting used to, too, people talking with their mouths full and laughing - Finn is sitting in his bunk trying not to stare at the flicker of the Force around him when there’s a knock at the half open door.

He jerks up and immediately curses himself for it. What if something happened, he can't let himself be caught so unaware - he left the door open so that people could get him if they needed him-

-but it's Rose, smiling stiffly, her hands in front of her face. "Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to startle - sorry."

Finn shakes his head. "Is something happening?"

"No, no, I just." Rose pushes her hair away from her face. He doesn't know what any of her gestures mean, and all he can sense in the force is- nervousness, and that - that can't be good, what's wrong? Part of his brain slides off to alertness. He's done something, missed something and now he's in trouble. "On Crait. When I kissed you."

Finn blinks, caught off guard. 

"I know it was kind of out of the blue, and I know we haven't talked about any of that, and I know you’re… really close to Rey. I just wanted to say that it. Doesn't have to mean anything if you don't want it to, okay?"

She smiles, stiff, and Finn doesn't know what to say. Finn had been kissed before that day, but only as a part of sex. It was never important, just a pleasant sensation in between other pleasant sensations, a part of the exchange. It never meant anything.

She's waiting for a response, he thinks, so he just - tries to smile, and nods, and says, "Okay."

"Okay. Well. Um. Still friends, right?"

Finn has completely lost the thread of this conversation. "Yeah, of course."

Rose leaves, and Finn feels like he's failed a test somehow. He can feel pain, or he thinks it's pain. He’s hurt her, and he doesn’t know how. He leans back on his bed and watches the Force flicker in his head, sending signals he doesn't know how to read.

Finn has nightmares - strange tense dreams of running through the corridors of the finalizer, only the map is wrong, corridors looping around into themselves and doors that open to empty space. He wakes up, and tastes rust in his mouth.

Finn leaves the base for the first time with Poe. There's a settlement within a day's speeder ride, apparently, and General Organa seems to believe they won't be bothered. Finn isn't sure, but, orders are orders. He watches the sky as they ride out over sand dunes, time stretching in a way that makes his shoulders itch, the sand blurring into so much static. 

The market is crowded with people of more species than Finn realized existed. Poe bargains and charms the shop keeps and Finn just tries to not be noticeable. To be casual, mimicking Poe’s steps, the way he holds his shoulders, loose and low.

He isn’t good at it. He walks like a Stormtrooper, shoulders high and strides stiff, hands at his sides because he isn’t holding a weapon. He feels conspicuous. Noticeable. He often feels like that, like a white ship in a bay of black tie fighters. But here, out in the open, it’s worse, because here it /matters/.

He keeps his eyes open as they walk. Sweeps across the crowds around like he was trained to - to look for insurgents, and that thought makes him shiver, a bit, makes his even pace falter.

He -

-he stiffens, his grip on Poe’s arm going tight and serious. But then the crowd shifts again, and Finn can’t find her in it again. If it was her. Tall enough, and the posture was the same - and he’s never seen her face, except for that sliver - he killed her - but could Phasma be killed by someone like /him/?

He can’t make himself believe that he killed her. He’s not sure, even now, that she died. He’s almost certain she /didn’t/. There’s no way he would be able to kill her. He remembers sparring against her, as a part of training – he remembers the unrelenting speed and ruthlessness of her. It was both a test of promising troopers and a reminder: you are not better than her, and you never will be.

“Hey buddy, are you okay?” Poe twists to grab his wrist. “Something up?

Finn stares at the crowd again. There is no shout of stormtroopers, no panic in the crowd. He shakes his head. “Let’s just keep going.”

They’re on their way out, now, passing through the crowds to “get a feel for the mood”, Poe says. Finn doesn’t quite know what he means, but keeps an eye around them anyway.

Vid screens embedded in the wall of shops display the news of the Galaxy. As they walk past, jostling through the crowd, Finn catches snippets of announcements. "Galactic economy stabilizes" - he's not sure what that one means, or what "establishment of universal documentation for travelers" is about, though some of the language reminds him of what troopers put on border checks would talk about. There are shorter snippets, talking about items Finn has never heard of, how much they cost and where to buy them. Then the announcement switches, with a tone that Finn was trained to recognize - his shoulders tense even before the image comes up of -

"They are enemies of the Order and dangerous to any who encounter them." The screen displays Rey, and - fuck, that's his face, he's standing right in front of the screen and - "If you have any information, report to the nearest stormtrooper or officer. Remember: if you see something, say something."

Finn takes one breath, tension racing around in his lungs, and then another, too quick - not now, not now, he can't -

Phasma must have warned them, it really was her, they’re under observation, he knew it -

Poe tugs him close, an arm slung around his shoulder. Obscuring their faces from view, Finn realizes.

“Walk casual. The more you react the more noticeable it’ll be.” Finn nods. He’s distantly aware of his pulse racing, but his skin feels numb. Everything feels distant, unconnected, through a layer of static. He feels like he’s in a training simulation. What if - “We’re just a normal pair of shoppers, you know? Just like how you got me out, remember? Everything is normal. Nothing to worry about.” Poe keeps talking, right into his ear, and Finn lets Poe lead him forward and past the vid screens, through the strange simulation replacing his reality, towards where their speeder is waiting for them.

They make it back to the base without further incident. Finn doesn’t talk. He isn’t sure how much of the trip he actually notices, time stretching and warping around his perception. Simulations always did that, he remembers, made it feel like time was passing faster than it was -

Rey meets them at the door. Her expression is creased – worry, Finn thinks, though he’s not sure why. Did something go wrong while they were out?

“Finn, are you alright?” She grabs him in a hug as he steps off the speeder. “I felt something in the Force, like you were upset, and then I couldn’t reach you the same and –“ She pulls back, and she’s – she’s right, his awareness of her is different somehow. Muted, like she’s far away, or there’s a layer of something between them. He doesn’t know what it means or how to make it stop, just that Rey is worried and it’s his fault.

“I’m - okay.” He lies. Maybe. He can’t tell if it’s a lie or not, right now.

Finn ducks into his room, and tries to make himself feel again.

He’s still not sure this isn’t a complex simulation. They did that, sometimes, in training: take everyone in the middle of night and put them into a sim to see how they reacted when they didn’t know it was a simulation. Finn could always tell, though: there was something in the way the distances or faces looked, or in the way textures felt.

He rubs his fingers over the texture of the jacket, and suddenly, he can’t tell. He can’t be sure, everything coated with a layer of rust and sand, and - He’s receiving signals out of sync with each other, and he’s - he’s -

-If this is a simulation, then maybe it’s all been a simulation, maybe he didn’t get out, maybe it’s all been -

“Finn?” He looks up. Rey sits next to him on his bed, reaching for his hand. After a moment, he takes hers. “Poe told me there was an alert for us on the broadcasts while you guys were out.”

Finn swallows. He shrugs, and doesn’t know what to say. Rey doesn’t press, and Finn is grateful.

Finn dreams of being pursued by something he can't see, never escaping no matter how fast he runs. His joints are rusted up, gears catching, and no matter how much he tries to clean it off there’s always more.

He wakes, gasping, to find -

"Rey?"

Rey burrows against him, one arm thrown across his chest. "Could feel you," she mumbles into his shoulder.

Finn winces. "Sorry," he manages. Rey mumbles something back, but he can't quite make it out. He'll have to figure out how not to wake her up, next time.

Finn and Rey continue to sort through the available scrap material. Finn has no idea where it all came from. This place seems like it's been abandoned for years.

Today, Poe joins them, though he's not helping so much as sitting on an overlook and talking. It's... 'hanging out', Finn thinks. It's strange, having people who spend time together because they want to, even when not on duty. It's strange, being allowed to spend time together, instead of stolen moments when the officers weren't looking.

"Hey, Rey." Poe hops down from his perch. "What's that- under there." He waves at something in the pile. Rey looks over her shoulder in that direction, and reaches her hand out.

Finn sees the Force flow out from her hand, glowing lines on the inside of his mind, to wrap around something in the pile and tug. She does it so casually, and Finn's seen her move things with the Force multiple times now, but it's still incredible.

Something huge lifts out of the pile of scrap, bits of metal and rust falling from it as it rises. Finn stares at it, confused. All he can make out is plasma scorched plates and rusted metal.

"It's... a box?" Finn hazards.

Behind him, he hears Poe take in a breath.

"It's a /ship/."

Finn stares at him, eyebrows up. He glances between the hunk of metal and Poe's excited face, looking for something that looks vaguely ship-like. "..Pretty sure it's a box."

"No, I think Poe's right." Rey tilts her head, the metal tilting in the air at the same angle. "I think - see those bits on the sides? That's where the wings would have attached, I think." Finn looks at where she indicates but only sees differently shaped bits of metal among other bits of metal. "It must have crashed and only the cockpit survived, but I think it's - I wonder if the flight computer survived?"

"Rey. Hear me out. You could build me a ship." Poe waves his hands around the floating ship, sketching out shapes in the air. "Something quick and light and totally unidentifiable because it's one of a kind."

Rey's mouth twists, and he can see her thinking. "It might be doable..."

"Rose could help." Finn says, feeling awkward when they both look at him. "She's good at that kind of thing."

"She /is/, great idea, do you know where she is?" Poe grins, words coming rapid fire and eager.

"Uh." Finn reaches for the sense of Rose in his head and finds her. "Shipyard, I think."

"Great! Let's go." Poe pauses, glances up at the floating hunk of metal. "Rey, do you have that?" 

Rey nods, but Finn can see the tension in her hand. "I can help," he offers before he thinks about what that would mean. But it makes Rey smile at him, so he takes a deep breath, and reaches out the way he's felt Rey reach out, trying to take some of the weight of the ship.

"Well, someone's a gentleman." Poe winks at him, and then starts off towards the shipyard. Finn blinks at him, not sure what he meant - he looks over to Rey, and she shrugs. She doesn't know either. That helps, a bit.

Finn doesn't know how much he contributes. But they get the ship through the twisting tunnels without knocking it into any walls, and set it down in an open space in the shipyard.

"What'd you guys find?" Rose wanders over, wiping grease off of her hands onto a rag.

"A ship!" Poe gestures to it.

"A potential ship." Rey corrects, leaning over the ship and sticking her hand into a gap in the metal, reaching for something. "I don't know if the flight computer survived, but if it did, we could use it as a base for something Poe could fly."

Rose tilts her head and walks back and forth around the ship for a moment. Then she nods, smiling.

"Yeah, it's doable."

Poe cheers.

Finn stares at the thing that's supposedly a ship. He still doesn't see it, just a mess of rusted metal and caved in panels, only fit for being taken apart for scrap. But he doesn't say any of that, and instead listens to his three friends talk in terms he barely understands.

General Organa starts sending them off planet on missions. Finn had expected that they would - lay low, or something, and try not to attract attention.

But orders are orders, so Rey and Finn and Poe go out on the Falcon, ferrying refugees on one trip and running supplies on the next.

On one trip, Finn wakes up in a jolt certain that they're about to run into a patrol. He stumbles into the cockpit where Rey is watching the expanse of space.

"Finn?" She jerks out of the seat. "What's -" She narrows her eyes and he feels the Force billow out from her like a desert wind, searching. "I don't feel anything wrong, are you okay?"

"Patrol," he manages. Certainty is fading, replaced by shame. "Or... I thought there was, at least." He shakes his head. Why did he think he could tell? He's not Rey. It was probably nothing.

"I'll keep an eye out." Rey smiles at him, and he can't tell if she's just trying to make him feel better or not. The Force is a haze of static. "Go back to sleep."

Finn and Rey are on Yavin alone - supposedly meeting a Rebellion contact. Poe had winked at them as they boarded the Falcon without him, and Finn isn’t sure what that was about.

But it doesn’t matter. The person they were supposed to find wasn’t there, and if Rey can’t find them, no one can. They gathered information about where the person might be, and a few parts for Rey’s project ship, and now they’re on their way out.

The crowd thickens in front of them, and Finn doesn’t even need to see the flash of white armor to know what’s wrong.

Gate patrols. Finn feels tension race up his spine, feels his breath go too shallow and too quick. Rey grabs his hand, squeezing once. He barely manages to squeeze back before letting go.

Rey can keep him safe. Rey can keep herself safe. Rey can do anything, he thinks. There’s no reason for him to be nervous, for his veins to shake inside of his chest -

-he glances around the crowd, searching for someone tall enough, for the posture and the pale skin he saw through a cracked mask-

Too late. They’re at the checkpoint, and Finn dreads being asked for their idents, no matter how skillfully forged they were. He tries to keep his worry from Rey’s mind, tries to trap it inside of his skull.

The stormtrooper stares at him. Finn misses his mask suddenly, misses the safety of it, misses being no one –

He feels this moment hang in the back of his mind, potential and – something, he doesn’t know what, but he doesn’t pay attention, he can’t, not right now - he’s too focused on being who he needs to be right now, on being no one, to try and figure out what the Force is telling him.

"Carry on." The stormtrooper says, after a moment, and then turns away to address the next in line.

Finn doesn’t let himself react, and keeps walking towards the shipyard.

They make it out without any other attention, but the itching sensation between Finn’s shoulder blades of being watched doesn’t fade until they hit atmo.

That night, he sits in his on the Falcon and notices that his hands are shaking. He’s not sure why. He doesn’t feel like anything is wrong. He - doesn’t feel anything. It’s a simulation, again, or he’s the simulation, a droid that’s malfunctioning badly enough that it thinks it’s something else. People talked about that, encouraged the Officers, of what happened if a trooper went too long without training or reconditioning. Of the irrational behavior, delusions - shorting out like a droid that had been corrupted -

He bites his lip, until the pain brings everything back in sync again. He tastes rust and salt. He thinks, suddenly, of Ren pushing his fingers into his wound, but shakes his head.

At least this time, he’s blocked enough that Rey doesn’t come running, caught in the overspill from his emotions. He’s grateful for that, at least.

Finn sits in the shipyard on base, watching Rey and Rose climb all over their project ship. It, admittedly, still looks like a pile of scrap to Finn, something that only takes up space and distracts them from more useful work. All he can see is rust and warped metal. But he can’t tell them to /not/ do it, so he just spends time around them. Poe lays on a bench nearby, an old data pad open above his face.

“Hey,” Poe calls out, something in his voice that Finn doesn’t recognize. “Anyone want to watch the Coronation of the New Supreme Leader?”

Finn asked Poe about Ren once, because there’s something in the way Poe talks about him that he doesn’t understand. But Poe – his expression had shut down, and changed the subject, and Finn hadn’t asked again.

Rey makes a disgusted noise, and Poe laughs, and that’s the end of that.

Finn knew that something was going to go wrong, the moment Rey dropped them off before going on her own mission. But he felt like that a lot, now. He’d almost stopped noticing the tension in his shoulders, the alerts in the corner of his mind.

Phasma’s never there, no matter how many times he checks.

So this time, when his shoulders tense for no reason and he thinks he senses something, alerts in his mind going up, he - he doesn’t ignore it, but he doesn’t mention it anyone either. It’s probably nothing, because he’s no good at this, he’s -

This time, it isn’t nothing.

The trooper hasn’t tried to knock them out. They put the cuffs on the nice way, gentle enough that Finn barely feels them if he doesn’t move. The trooper keeps tilting their helmet in his direction, barely a half a degree, looking without being caught. All of these things register on the top level of Finn’s mind, barely noticed over his pulse, over the knowledge that he messed up, he should have noticed, they’re going to be taken back and it’s all his fault.

His only comfort is that Rey isn’t there, off with Chewie and the Falcon on a search for Kyber crystals. She won’t be taken in with them, won’t have to face injury or worse at the hands of the Order. It’s bad enough that Poe is here. 

They can escape, Finn thinks, but it won’t be pretty. He’s already planning how much damage he can take for Poe’s sake before he wouldn’t be able to escape himself. He doesn’t think Poe would be willing to leave him behind.

The cell door slides open. Finn can hear that it’s an officer before he sees it; the clip of boots against tile makes his back straighten, his body instinctively trying to shift to parade rest regardless of the cuffs behind his back.

“Well, well, well.” The officer - major, from his stripes, probably the commanding officer of this outpost - crosses his hands behind his back and smirks. “This is a surprise.” The trooper next to him stands at attention, their blaster aimed between Finn and Poe.

Finn lowers his eyes, just a little bit, to break eye contact with the officer. He saw everything he needed to see, he thinks: boots and gloves too fine to be regulation, uniform cut to make him look taller. The solid clip of his boots against the floor, the tone of voice. 

“What, nothing to say, traitor?”

Poe opens his mouth to respond, and Finn looks at him. He isn’t sure if he thinks “shut up” loud enough for Poe to hear, but Poe closes his mouth.

The officer snorts, amused. “I suppose there’s nothing worth hearing from a defective stormtrooper, after all. You know, when they put the alerts out for the lot of you, I couldn’t /believe/ that you could be nearly as dangerous as suggested… Had our esteemed General finally cracked?” He grins, clearly amused with himself. “Nonetheless, the supreme leader has asked for you, so I will happily deliver you to him myself.”

The officer keeps talking, drawing out fantasies of how he’ll be rewarded for the capture. Finn ignores him. Finn instead thinks: rocks, moving under Rey’s mind, the shared weight of a ship. Finn isn’t Rey, and doesn’t think he can do something like that without her. But the cuffs are small, and every trooper was briefed on their function and operation. Not in great detail, but enough to identify common problems. Enough of how things could go wrong, to know how things were supposed to work.

Finn breathes, in and out. He reaches out to the Force, as best he can, and focuses on the cuffs around his wrists. He builds an image of the internal circuitry in his mind, and presses one wire and then another.

He feels the cuffs give, loosen around his wrists. Not enough to break them, but he might be able to slip free. He takes a deep breath, and starts to work on Poe’s cuffs.

“Trooper.” Finn fights his first instinct to salute as the trooper does. “Watch them. The cameras are off,” he says, an smile crossing his face, “Can’t have news of this spreading before my official announcement, after all. So if the traitor is a bit… roughed up, when I return, that’s acceptable.”

“Sir.”

The officer leaves. The door slides closed with a click. Finn looks at the trooper left guarding them, and then at their blaster: aimed at his chest as is regulation.

The gun dips, just enough to point the barrel away from vital organs. Still a killing shot, but a slower one.

"You're Finn."

Finn breathes out. He nods, once. The gun wobbles a little bit, dips lower, away from a direct shot entirely.

“You. You got out. You’re alive.” The trooper’s shoulders shift. “They told us you were killed on the Supremacy. That Phasma killed you.”

He shakes his head. “No she - went down first. We grabbed a ship and escaped.”

“You got /out/.” The trooper repeats, and there is a vibration in their voice, a double meaning that Finn recognizes from his own voice. He swallows.

He shrugs, as much as he can without breaking the cuffs open. “...For a little while, at least.”

The blaster points at the ground. It’s against regulation, but the cameras are off, so maybe they won’t get in trouble. Their shoulders slump, a degree out of proper posture. “You got out and I have to take you back.”

Finn can’t even be angry at them. He might have to kill them to get out, and he doesn’t want to do that anymore than they want to fight to keep him there. But they both understand survival, and what it means you have to do sometimes. The officers are always watching, and judging, and - 

“You don’t have to.” The cameras are off. The cameras are off, and for a few moments they are not being watched. The trooper’s shoulders jerk in surprise, and Finn doesn’t have any further plan, why did he even -

“Once the officer comes back,” Poe cuts in, and Finn breathes out a wash of relief that someone has a plan, “I’ll distract him, and all you gotta do is not notice that we’re moving towards the door, okay? Okay.”

The trooper is still for a long moment and Finn doesn’t breathe. Then they nod, and Finn should leave it at that, not dare, but -

“Come with us.”

The universe hangs in pause. He can feel the balance wobbling – he can feel them considering it -

"I - I can't leave my squad, Spitz - she'd never stay out of reconditioning alone, she's barely staying out of trouble now - I can't."

Finn understands. He really does. If that night Slip hadn’t - Finn nods, once, and then again. "Okay." A ripple of surprise echoes in the Force. Finn can't tell where it comes from. "Okay. Just stay safe, okay? Look after your squad - what's your name?"

“El-” the trooper stop, shakes their head. “-Nova. It’s. Nova.”

“Nova. Okay.” Finn glances over at the door, half expecting the officer to walk through, and then back. “Okay.”

It works. Finn didn’t really expect it to work, and kept waiting for it to go wrong, for the trap – but Poe’s quick mouth distracts the officer enough that he doesn’t notice them edging towards the door. They make a run for it – Nova fires at them but the shots go wide.

They’ll probably be punished for it anyway, but not as much as they would have been if they hadn’t fired at all.

Yanking the cuffs off of his wrists as they sprint out of the outpost, Finn tries to tell himself that’s enough.

Finn and Poe race through the town. Finn’s ears are ringing with the alert blaring on every vid-screen, but they have to keep moving, steal a ship or something -

He’s deciding where to go on instinct, and Poe is following him, and maybe he’s leading him into a trap -

-Finn looks up at a roar of engines and then he feels the Force, no, he feels /Rey/ grab hold of him and lift him up as he jumps for the Falcon’s gangplank.

Rey hauls them both up, and they stumble into a pile on the floor of the Falcon. The ship bolts into hyperspace as soon as the gangplank closes.

“Your timing is incredible.” Poe laughs, leaning into Rey’s shoulder.

Finn shakes his head. Adrenaline is still racing in his veins. “Why are you even here?” It comes out - he sounds angrier than he is, he isn’t angry at her, except - she was /safe/, somewhere totally out of the way -

“I had a vision,” she says, grabbing onto him and not letting go. “Or, I knew you were in trouble, I knew I had to -” She shakes her head, her hair loose and tangled “I had to help.”

Finn can’t be angry at her. Rey is /Rey/, she would never do anything but try to help. If she didn’t try to save someone in trouble she wouldn’t be her. He can’t be angry at her, but emotion is still pounding in his skull because if she got hurt -

If he were better, he wouldn’t have needed a rescue. If he hadn’t messed up she would still be off connecting with the Force, safe and far away.

“Thanks,” he tells her, even though she deserves better.

“So,” Poe says, leaning on the wall outside of General Organa’s makeshift office. They’re both waiting for the General to finish up with Rey so they can make their own reports on their close call. There’s something - in his face, but Finn doesn’t know what it means. He’s too focused on how he’s going to justify himself to the General to wonder. “What’s ‘reconditioning’? I heard the trooper mention it.”

Finn stares at him for a moment before understanding the question. “Oh. Must be called something different here.” He’s encountered more than a few things like that. “It’s where - you need to be better, so the officers call you in.”

“Hm. Okay. Retraining?”

“Yeah, that.” Finn can’t even imagine what reconditioning must be like in the Rebellion. He doesn’t want to ever find out. He pictures General Organa, strong in the Force, digging into people’s minds and pulling out all of their weaknesses and disloyalty. In the Order, there had been too many stormtroopers and not enough Force users, and Hux would have never allowed it, but the Rebellion was smaller. It would be feasible to do it that way, here. Faster, even, probably.

Then the door open and the General waves them in, and there’s no more time to wonder.  
  


The walls are white. The floor is white. Everything is white on white on white, the edges blurring, his armor becoming the wall becoming the floor -

-he does not have skin, his armor is his skin, he does not have a face, he does not have a face - there is nothing but white on white on white and 

-state your designation -

-my name is fi- my - i have a name -

-state your designation-

he tries to scream but what comes out is - my designation is FN-2187

-what is your purpose -

i don’t have to - my purpose is to - my purpose is to serve - my purpose is to serve the Order -

“Finn!”

He jerks up, heart pounding, the Oath of the Order half way out of his throat - but what he finds instead of a reconditioning officer is Rey, her hair loose and her eyes bleary

“I felt - are you okay, I felt -” She swallows. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” he lies, because of course he does.

Finn isn’t sleeping much, lately. Finn keeps dreaming about Slip, bleeding out in the sand. He keeps dreaming about Reconditioning, about white on white becoming his entire reality. At least Rey hadn’t felt any of his nightmares since the last time. She’s got enough to worry about, learning how to use the Force, without worrying about his flaws.

It’s starting to blur into his waking hours, or what he thinks are waking hours. His entire life is a haze of static.

Maybe he’ll turn himself in for retraining, or whatever they call reconditioning here. That’d be the right thing to do, he decides. Even if it means he’ll lose bits of himself. He’ll let General Organa’s solar flare Force burn away everything in him, carve him into pieces until he doesn’t recognize himself, if it means that he’ll be what he needs to be. If it means he can keep people safe.

Reconditioning always was easier if you self reported. If you started knowing you were broken and needed to be fixed. If you didn’t try to fight it.

He’ll turn himself into the General when they get back to base from this mission, he thinks, hazy in his bunk. She’ll fix him. Make him into the soldier Rey and Rose and Poe need him to be.

Finn thinks about white walls and white floors until eventually, he sleeps.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter specific tags: disassociation, self hatred, teasing that the reader understands is romantic though the pov character doesn't, paranoia,


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter specific notes in the end notes

/you will never be free of me/

Supreme Leader Kylo Ren jerks awake. Around his room, items crash to the ground from where they had been hanging, suspended in the air like criminals on the gallows. A glass shatters. Ren pushes up from his bed and looks down at the shards of glass on the floor, trying to divine meaning from the pattern, but it is in a script he cannot read.

A cleaning droid eventually comes, sweeps the glass away before leaving again. Ren is left alone.

He does not feel alone.

Ren taps his fingers on the armrest of his throne, the only release he allows of the pressure building and building inside of him. The sound echoes through the empty throne room, no tapestries to absorb the noise and no people to muffle it but himself and the other.

The room does not feel empty. It feels crowded, smothering, every breath from someone else’s lungs -

"Supreme Leader," the General says, bowing, and almost sounds like he means it.

Hux is ambitious and scheming and ruthless, every inch the snarling cur Snoke called him. He hates the Force, he hates Ren, and hates anything standing between him and power.

He is also the most competent General the Order has, a starkly efficient administrator, and perhaps most importantly - and irritatingly - enough, the officer core believes in him. 

There is no General in the order without ambition. But Hux he knows. He does not trust Hux to be honest or loyal, but he trusts Hux to be /Hux/.

Ren stares down from his mas- his throne. His senses catch on Hux's neck, and his back, and then he pulls his attention away. It does not matter.

“Who’s taking Phasma’s position?”

Hux narrows his eyes. They have not spoken of Crait, now weeks past, or what happened there – they have not spoken of Starkiller.

But neither has Ren asked for Hux’s insight, either.

He should not do so. He should be authoritative, give demands and be obeyed; look into the Force and pull out the best choice. He needs no one and concedes nothing.

And yet, his dreams echo in his head.

Hux has the strongest shields he’s ever seen on a Force Null, and he /is/ completely null, with no touch of the Force on him even now. Hux is Hux - stable, familiar, and totally himself. Hux is /his/, in a way he hadn’t been before.

Eventually, Hux lets out a breath.

“I was not aware that I had been assigned-”

“You hadn’t.” Hux’s expression flickers, but does not turn sour. “But you have someone in mind.”

Hux is more closed off than ever before. His tells are muted, his mind more guarded than ever. He does not look at Ren like a co-commander any longer, not that thing that was almost an equal. He is Hux’s better, and now Hux knows it too, and yet -

/broken boy, broken, not fit for anything, this is why I had to/

A ripple echoes in the Force, just enough to kick up a breeze –enough make Hux /flinch/, back straightening and jaw tensing. The air tastes like dried blood and memory.

But that wasn’t – Ren hadn’t, that wasn’t –

No matter. Hux should fear him. /still using someone else’s power/

Ren’s jaw tightens. Hux stares over his shoulder.

“I do have a few candidates, Supreme Leader.” Ren nods, and Hux lays out his options and his reasoning. It’s good, seeing him confident, the stable cadence of his voice and his steps as he paces before the throne.

/You still need someone else to be strong, you still are too weak to stand, you need me you need me you need/

“Enough.” Hux stops short. Ren swallows. “Assemble your candidates and bring them to me.” Hux nods. “Dismissed.”

The voice had started a few days after. A few days after Crait, after he'd offered Rey and been refused, after -

After.

It had started quiet, a whisper under his thoughts, light as footsteps through the corridors of his mind. Even now, still quieter than it had been - before.

The voice had started, and Ren had not noticed it. It was so familiar, as much a part of the background noise of his mind, that it had taken days for him to realize he shouldn't be hearing it anymore. It was - it was -

It had felt right, and that was the worst part of it - it had felt like something missing was slowly returning, a limb regrowing, a missing ingredient to complete a ritual finally added - the haze of unreality finally fading to reveal familiar life -

Except this wasn't real. It couldn't be. He was free, all shackles broken and all control returned to him where it should be, he was /free/ -

/That's what you thought when you were a child, wasn't it boy, always trying to hide/

So much, Snoke had denied him. Purity of body, purity of mind - Ren is free of such demands, now. He is free, for the first time in his life, and he indulges himself. He orders expensive sheets and uses his whole water ration in the shower.

In the privacy of his rooms, he touches himself, draws it out in ways he hasn’t in years. He treats his body’s sensations as something to be enjoyed and not something to be endured. It is - good, very good, his body responding like he’s a teen again -

/so weak you collapse into indulgence/

He snarls into his pillow but doesn’t stop. He owes Snoke nothing, not his loyalty or his fear or his body, not his pleasure or his pain.

/you owe me everything/

Ren’s shoulders twitch, curling in on himself, forcing his mind to focus on pleasure. He is strong, he is, he deserves this, he is-

/a child chasing petty pleasures/

Ren tears his hand away from himself with a growl. His hands clench on his sheets and his mind flying up and out around the room. He finds nothing, nothing, /nothing/ -

The prisoner has no useful information on the Rebellion. Ren knows this the moment he begins to dig into their mind, no matter what Hux thought he would find.

The prisoner grits his teeth, as if that would help him resist the Force ripping into his mind, like Ren thought when it would when he was a child. Ren snarls and twists his fingers and twists the Force, rooting through for anything of use and finding nothing. 

Blood starts to drip from the prisoner's nose, and his mind offers up paltry secrets - a love affair, a mansion kept off the records. Such scraps, he had tried to protect and failed.

Pathetic.

Ren had done no more than what Snoke had done to him in training. Ren had learned how to tear apart a mind at his former master's hands, Snoke stabbing into his brain over and over until Ren could replicate each technique and attack.

And even the child Ren had been found ways to hide the things that mattered to him.

If they really cared about protecting their secrets, these wretches would do the same. 

Hux has his trackers and spies and psychological profiles - Ren had something far grander to find the scraps of the Resistance with.  
  
He orders everyone away, even Hux. Alone in his rooms, Ren settles onto the floor and works his way through meditation, opening his mind – he breathes in darkness and breathes out power. He is ultimate, he is infinite, everywhere the darkness is he is also, seeking and -

/seek and ye shall find me, knock and I will answer child, you just have to let me in /

Ren jerks out of meditation. Something across the room shatters. He heaves a breath, and then another, but they don’t help, nothing helps.

His hands are trembling. He notices this distantly, like he’s still meditating, like he’s still not in his body, watching from a step removed as someone else - He swallows, and pushes up from the floor. He goes to his training room, and spars against nothing until he feels like his body will obey him again.

There is to be a Coronation. Kylo isn’t entirely sure why. He is in a meeting, one of entirely too many, with Hux and a whole hoard of old imperial officers. They use words like ‘symbolic continuity’ and ‘emphasizing the stability and power of the Order’ and Ren isn’t listening, instead spending the entire meeting wandering through their minds, wading through the thick sludge of their hatred and resentment. Of him. Of Hux. Of each other.

Hux’s mind is a locked gate, even now, but the others are not so skilled. Mikata, nervous, staring at Hux’s neck – the taste of his fear is familiar. Some old imperial glowering in the corner, her mind full of her old titles and resentment for Hux’s place at Ren’s side. A blur of indistinguishable uniforms, barely more than cheap droids, full of resentment to cover up their own fear -

/foolish mortals foolish bugs we are better than them we can be better than them you should have been better/

“Is this to your satisfaction, Supreme Leader?”

Ren pulls the details from Mikata’s mind. Ostentatious. There will be a speech, but he won’t have to give it. “...It will do. Dismissed.”

The other officers salute and filter out. Hux remains a moment longer. His mind is still closed – no flicker of satisfaction or annoyance, no hint of any emotion from him.

Before, Hux would have glared at him, asked if he was listening at any point. Ren would tell the truth or a lie, depending on his mood and which he thought would get a better response.

But now, Hux only meets his eyes for barely too long, and then salutes.

“They hate you.” Ren isn’t sure why he says it. He wants Hux to growl at him, get annoyed, look at him and not through him -

“They always have.” Hux says instead, with a faint shrug. He still isn’t meeting Ren’s eyes.

How unconcerned he is. How little he cares. Maybe Hux buries it all beneath denial and self-illusion. He would be the type. But Ren cannot find out without breaking him entirely, and Hux - Hux has value yet.

/liar liar you are too weak to admit/

  
The oscillator, the rush of wind around them. His mask on the walkway below.  
  
Han, Han, reaching forward - Han touching his face, begging him to come home.  
  
Ren wants to scream. Ren wants to end it, wants to do what he must, cut this tie to who he used to be, kill the past and burn it, destroy anything that ever had any power over him –  
  
But – this time, his grip falters; this time, his saber clatters to the walkway and then falls to the red abyss below them. Ren screams but it doesn’t come out of his mouth, it just reverberates on the inside of his skull until his entire being is noise and pain.  
  
This time, he is not strong enough, and he gives in to the tangled web where he will surely suffocate. This time, when that calloused hand touches his face, he is weak enough to pretend that the person Han is looking for is someone who can be found.

Kylo Ren awakes, his bed covers floating above him. He lets them fall and does not move.  
  


The assembled commanders and generals salute as he steps onto the Coronation stage. Ren looks over them all and hates them, every single one of them: the old imperials clinging to a legacy of scraps, young imperials dreaming of power and glory - and Hux, both and neither, the only one who manages to look him in the eye at all.

Ren hates him the most, or possibly the least.

There is a speech. Hux wrote it. He sent a copy this morning, but Ren didn’t bother reading it, and he listens with half an ear. He's barely required to be here. It would be different, he thinks, if this event were in truly in his honor, but it isn’t. It doesn't matter who's the leader, only that one is seen to exist, he's a figure head, a hollow image that no one really looks at -

/mirror mirror boy, you're never going to be more than a mirror, never more than an image/

-No. Snoke was a symbol, he will not be, he will be more.

Hux is still talking. Ren shifts on his feet, barely aware, barely present, he could be doing anything else right now -

"With the spirit of our fallen leader to guide us-”

Ren jolts still. All around him, the First Order banners flare up and twist in a sharp and sudden wind.

The speech continues. Ren can’t stop staring at Hux. Why would he say that? Was it an acknowledgment of the spectre, or an invocation? Hux hated Snoke, but does he hate Ren more? Would he summon up the ghost simply to spite Ren? No, Hux hates the Force and would never wield it for his own purposes. Unconscious influence, maybe? That was always one of Snoke’s tricks, except for when it wasn’t-

Ren walks off the stage, or at least his body does. He follows Hux to a secure room, or maybe it’s a hallway, he’s not sure -

-he grabs Hux’s shoulder. Hux stiffens, and Ren can feel the thrum of his surprise and tension under his hand.

“Sir?” Hux turns. Ren removes his hand. 

“Why did you say that?” Those aren’t the right words, he can tell, Hux doesn’t understand what he - “About Snoke. Why did you say that he was watching.”

He doesn’t know what his own voice sounds like, if it’s too loud or too flat - he misses his vocoder, misses the machine that turns all of his words the same and makes his voice something he can control.

Hux raises both eyebrows at him.

“It’s a metaphor, Ren, surely you’ve heard of them?” Ren gapes at him. He senses nothing from Hux but annoyance, the bitter tang of old frustration, no intent or even the taste of coercion /you never could sense me unless I wanted you to/. Hux huffs and flicks his fingers over his datapad, adjusting appointments “I gave you the chance to look over the speech beforehand; if you felt that strongly about it you should have told me then.”

That wasn’t - “Why that? Why did you say that?” Ren looms, his anger curling around his spine, fire and energy- but Hux doesn’t back down. Hux breathes out very deliberately, and Ren feels something snap.

“Because the old bastards who pay for our ships get nervous when confronted with change, and it makes them feel better to think that the leader they were used to was still around. I am trying to keep them from overthrowing you,” Hux hisses and stares Ren in the eye. “I am trying to legitimize your fucking coup. You could at least be grateful.”

Ren stops short, eyes snapping open wide. His mouth opens but Hux is at full speed now.

“What, you think I didn’t know about that?” Hux snarls. Ren swallows, struck - Hux is a beacon in the Force, pure in his anger in a way Ren rarely reached, a white-hot laser that burns all it looks upon. “I know the marks your lightsaber leaves on a corpse.”

Focus, focus, register what he’s saying and not the burn of his anger. Ren manages: “Are you accusing me of treason?”

Hux snorts. He gives the impression that he would be rolling his eyes if he didn’t consider it undignified. “I’m accusing you of being sloppy. Sir.” The title sounds like an insult, the pause too deliberate to be anything else. Ren gapes at him. Hux sneers. “I made General at 30, Ren, and I didn’t do it on my _knees_.”

Ren breathes out, suddenly arrested by the image of - of Hux, on his knees, smiling like he’s trying to look harmless and sweet but it’s just a little too sharp; Hux, blood on his hands and his perfect uniform, even though he knows Hux would never be so messy. He swallows again, and hopes the heat he feels doesn’t show on his face.

From Hux’s expression and the exasperated tang in his emotions, Ren is certain it does.

“The Order needs a leader, and it needs stability.” Hux explains, in the tone of one talking to a child. “Thanks to your magic tricks and your position as Snoke’s student, you are currently the most politically viable candidate.

“For now, the old guard is willing to follow you.” Hux shows his teeth like a hound about to strike. ”If they found out, of course, that your reign began with assassination…” Ren snarls back, his anger flashing, and yet -

But Hux would never show a weapon if he was planning on using it. If Hux had planned on using this to destroy him, he could have done at any time, rather than let himself establish himself as Leader.

Ren's fingers twitched, meaninglessly. "I could pull the knowledge out of your mind."

Hux smirks. "Not without ruining me for anything else, you can't. And who knows where I've stored the information?"

With anyone else it would be a bluff.

Ren crosses his arms, fingers digging into the flesh of arm rather than reach out to choke. Hux is invaluable and fuck him, he knows it. This charade is tiring. "What are you asking for, General?"

Hux would not waste blackmail on something he felt he should be getting through the normal channels - Hux is many things, but he wouldn’t sacrifice the structure of the Order. Whatever he wants, it’s personal, and so a reveal of priorities.

“I want my rank.” Ren nods, almost without thinking: he knows the game Snoke played with him, with them both, dangling earned rewards just out of reach. “And I want to know why you worked with her.” Something flickers in the Force around Hux, a different taste of anger, but it’s gone and buried before Ren can identify it.

Ren frowns. A light flickers with his irritation. “Snoke, he… joined our minds. Mine and the Scavenger. We had...visions, of each other.” He rubs his fingers against each other, trying to use the pressure to steady himself. It doesn’t help. “I thought she wanted to join me.” His expression snarls and the light shorts out. “She thought I wanted to go /back/.”

Hux crosses his arms. “Are the two of you still ‘joined’, or do we have a potential information leak?”

Ren shakes his head. “No, she - destroyed the link.” Another thought, tumbling out of his mouth: “There are steps I will take to prevent outside influence.”

No words, just laughter echoing in his mind, bouncing off of all the crags and empty spaces in his head, infinite layers drowning him.

Hux snorts. “Very well.” He waves a datapad almost dismissively. “Is there anything else you would like to discuss, Sir?”

“....No. You are dismissed.” A pause. “Grand Marshal.”

Hux smiles and it looks like poison. “Excellent. I’ll send you the paperwork.”

Hux walks away, fearless as ever. Ren stares at his back as he goes.

Five people stand in front of Sno- Ren's throne. He thinks of The Knights of Ren, long dead at Snoke's hands, and a spike of fury lances through his chest.

He'd thought to rebuild the order with Rey as his first. But he didn't need her, or anyone else.

/a master of no one/ 

So Ren stares them down, these proposed replacements for Phasma. He closes his eyes half way and feels the Force nudge - the correct choice stands in front of him, but which -

/you don't know what to do without something to lead you, do you boy, don't worry I'll tell you what to do I'll tell you who to be/

-is it the Force, is it, he is certain but is he certain - what does correct even mean, what is he looking for –

A light above them flickers. Ren closes his eyes and focuses, pulling on the dark and scanning over the group. After a moment, he steps down from his throne and paces in front of the group, his footsteps ringing out in the silent room.

One is discounted for distain for the Force; two more for thinking about how they can return the stormtrooper program to Imperial Glory after being lead by a Trooper. Another sees this as a stepping stone on their career. The last -

"You." He says, stopping and opening his eyes. A stormtrooper sergeant, trained under Phasma. Her mind is solid and calm, with none of the sparking emotion of the others. She feels right, but he has to be sure- "Don't struggle."

She nods and he digs into her mind, his hands twitching.

Her mind is calm and well organized. It is not the blasted heath that Phasma’s was, all ruthless ambition and survival instinct. It is not like what glimpses he has seen of Hux’s mind, sprawling technical designs and Admiralty white. Her mind is a calm, still pond, and allows him in easily.

He finds - loyalty to her soldiers, loyalty to the Order. He finds confidence that the correct person will be chosen. He finds curiosity about the fate of the defector FN-2187. Ambition only so for what she can do for the Order and her soldiers. 

Ren pulls back. She is gasping, but is still standing.

"You." A pause as shock and disbelief, offense reverberate through the room. The officers seethe with resentment. Belatedly, Ren remembers more words are expected. "Congratulations, Captain Headshot. General Hux will brief you on your duties."

She salutes, and the room empties. Ren listens to the echoes of their steps and does not know if he has made any choice at all.

It’s the woods near the school, and he’s - he has to run, he has to get away, he doesn’t know where he’s running too or away from, but he can’t move fast enough, and everywhere he turns is another - tunnels, now, stone passageways old and ancient and filled with light, blinding, nowhere to hide - the senate floor, a hundred thousand eyes, and they call see him, all of him - he finds a dark corner but then the dark starts to strangle him, go inside of him, whispering mine mine mine mine mine

he deserves it because he’s dark this was always his fate, the dark told him, the dark will keep him safe from the prying eyes, no one will ever protect him like this-

Ren jerks awake. Something across the room shatters. He is alone, he is, he /is/ -

  
  


Another of an infinite string of meetings. Snoke never attended meetings, but Ren refused to allow the Order to be run by old Imperials and stand ins. 

An officer stands in front of the meeting, explaining the allocation of ships in the next quarter -

Ren's back straightens. His fists clench with an audible creak of leather. The officer - Ren doesn't remember her name, it doesn't matter, they don't matter - trails off in the middle of her sentence. Her eyes flick to him and then to Hux beside him.

Ren's lip curls into a snarl. A datapad on the table shakes like it is caught in a wind, like the room is a storm, like Ren's emotions will rend the entire ship apart -

"...Sir?" The officer tries. Her throat feels tight. He doesn't know if he's the one doing it. No matter. "Supreme leader, sir?"

"Why." Ren says, even before he knows how the sentence will end. "Why are we chasing old glories when the Resistance is still alive?"

That's all this is, he sees it with a blast of Knowledge: this is appeasing the old guard, convincing the crumbling remnants of the empire that they have something to gain. He will not suffer it any longer, this insult, this denial of his goals -

/liar liar hypocrite you chased your grandfather your uncle you're just pretending/

The datapad cracks.

The officer swallows, and glances at Hux again. Ren wants to rip her eyes out, wants to destroy her, wants to pull the answer from her mind, and his hand is halfway out before someone -

"With all do respect, Sire,” Someone else cuts in. Ren turns to them, swirling like a storm. An old imperial, one of the ones too cowardly to die with the Empire but instead turned tail and ran like rats - "These territories are the core of Imperial territory, the restoration of which is our express purpose."

Ren stares the old man down, his unearned medals glinting on his chest.

"I told you all," Ren says, and it echoes in the Force. "That we were building a new Empire. This is the end of legacies and heirlooms. We will not waste any more time on these worthless planets. I want the forces rerouted to security."

The old fool opens his mouth, and in that instant his shields flicker, and Ren feels all of his resentment for the loss of the Empire, of the glorious future that the Emperor had promised him, the birthright denied to him -

/birthrights and destinies they're not too different from you are they are they/

A crack rings out in the room. The old fool stares down at himself.

His breastbone, slowly caving in. The Force flows through Ren like a river, storm as the man clutches at his imploding chest and tries to plead.

The storm ends with a snap. The man slumps to the floor. Ren stares and drinks in the fear and the trembling energy and he is powerful. Untouchable.

Ren turns and walks from the room without another word. He is calm, floating in this nothingness of the dark, and that is so rare and precious that he wants to revel in it, wants to stay like this his entire life, wants to stay in this perfect detached place forever -

This is what he had been searching for, this is what he had always wanted, this disassociation from his own self, what Snoke had parceled out like it was more precious than Kyber -

/you think this is you, you think this is something you’ve gained for yourself, foolish foolish child as always/

Ren jerks to a stop in the hallway, awareness crashing back onto him. The hall is empty except for the hum of the ship and -

Ren turns to face Hux. This is normal, this is familiar – Ren had hurt someone without warning, and Hux would chase him down and lecture him for damage to staff or equipment, the only one on the ship who would approach him without fear of -

This is not normal. That is not normal anymore.

Hux stops, much further away than he would have before. Ren remembers their first meeting, years ago now, where Hux had gotten right up in his face and ignored the threat of the Force or his lightsaber, snarling that he didn’t care who he thought he was, such behavior would not be tolerated on his ship. Ren doesn’t remember what he’d done to get Hux angry that time.

Hux does not shout. Hux is not half way through a diatribe about resources when Ren notices him. If he is irritated he hides it. Hux crosses his arms behind his back and bows.

Ren notices, almost absently, that Hux’s hand trembles very faintly. Hux wraps it around the other wrist as soon as it starts and then comes up from the bow.

Ren remembers Hux gasping for breath in the wreckage of Snoke’s throne room, remembers the jolt of pain when Hux hit the console.

/he’s afraid of you he’s afraid of you isn’t this what you wanted isn’t this what you always wanted/

“Supreme Leader.” Hux says, and his voice is calm and respectful. He does not meet Ren’s eyes. “Officer Orin has been taken to the medical bay, awaiting your final decision on him.” A pause.

“We don’t have to keep doing this.” Hux stares at him. Ren can picture years of Hux playing along, appeasing old officers who only ever saw him as Hux Junior. “We don’t need to play along with the politics and egos of old men who should have died decades ago.”

Hux draws a breath, and his annoyance snaps enough for: “With all due respect, the Order was built on the contributions of the Imperial officers. Snoke promised them - “

A ripple of power echoes through the hallway, as if the name was a summoning, and Hux snaps his mouth shut.

“Snoke promised us all many things, Hux.”

Hux swallows, and again, that clench of hands. Ren stares, fascinated, not sure if he wants Hux to give in or -

“That is true, Supreme Leader, however, it will be easier to maintain connections and fund our operatiosn if we are known to maintain our promises. Even promises we did not, personally, make.”

Ren doesn’t know if he is pleased or angry that Hux continues to disagree with him /so weak boy so weak you need someone to be strong/

Hux is staring at him, expectantly. Ren needs to make a decision. /you took this throne and you don’t even know what to do with it boy why did I ever think you could be my heir/

“-Give the numbers.” Ren says, his mind snapping like a loose banner in the wind. Hux blinks at him. “Resources allocated to security, to expansion, to reclaiming imperial territory.” /you think you would know what any of those things mean, boy?/

“-yes sir, I will have them on your pad within the day.” A beat. “And the officer, sir?”

Ren forces himself to remember what Hux means. “-heal him, but, demote him.”

With that, Ren leaves and closes himself into his chambers to scream at no one. He flings his mind out, searching, but there’s no one in his rooms but him.

Hux sent him the numbers. Hux actually sent him the numbers and – Ren stares at them, trying to come to a conclusion, trying to be responsible once in his fucking life, but the numbers swim in front of him and he – he can’t focus, he can never focus.

He could touch the Force, pull insight and knowledge but -

/you are nothing without the Force, you are nothing, you are just a worthless child unworthy of the power you hold/

One of the lights above him shatters. Ren ignores it. He goes back to the numbers but it doesn’t help much. Eventually he – he gives in, he uses old tricks from when he was a kid, separates out the information so that he can look at once piece at a time, rearranges things so that they make sense. He works through a haze of static, numb fingers and numb mind.

/you can never escape who you used to be/

Another light shatters. A third breaks before Ren has come to any conclusion. He sends a message to Hux: maintain a contingent of efforts to recolonize Imperial territory, staffed with the officers most invested in such. Reroute remaining troops to security and stability.

/compromise is a sign of weakness/

Hux replies only with: “Understood, supreme leader.”

Ren throws the datapad across the room.

Ren trains, pushing his body until tension drops out of his shoulders. Then, in his private shower, he touches himself, gets himself off. It’s mechanical and habitual, concepts passing through his mind without analysis. A tone of voice, whispered in his ear; a leather glove and a flash of a pale wrist.

He rinses himself off and turns off the shower, all of the images and sensations he’d used to get off shoved into the back of his mind where he wouldn’t think about them again.

There’s an alert from Hux on his datapad, something about the trooper leadership. Complaints from the old Imperials. Something about a lack of oversight and a split command. Ren signs off on it without reading it. If Hux is so insistent on appeasing them, then he can deal with them himself.

Apparenlty what he'd signed off on was split command for the stormtrooper program - the stormtrooper he had personally chosen having to share command of the program with one of the officers Ren had rejected, some Tarkin nephew who had made a career out of his family connections. He's clearly only there to appease the old imperials, and Ren is furious at this insult-

He jerks his head up from his datapad. That isn't his fury.

He's on his feet and moving through the ship, drawn by the flarelight of emotion, finding -

“Supreme Leader.” Hux is furious and glorious with it. “I was just about to call you.” Hux smiles like something venomous, and gestures to an officer sprawled on the ground, held in position by pointed rifles. “Officer Roux, here, had the traitor and the pilot in his custody.” Rens stares. That’s not - he would have noticed - the officer opens his mouth but Hux glares at him. “They escaped. And then he tried to cover it up.”

The room goes cold.

“You had them in custody,” Ren says. The words feel like rock cracking, like a ship’s walls buckling under atmospheric pressure as it hurtles towards a planet for a crash landing. “And they got away.”

The officer clutches at his throat, but Ren isn’t choking him, or he doesn’t think he is, it must be - Ren pulls the Force away from the man’s throat with a snarl.

“Explain yourself.”

“Sir, the stormtrooper that was watching -”

The light above them cracks. Ren’s fist clenches. “Do not blame the stormtrooper for your mistakes. Enough of this.” His hand flies up and the Officer’s face pales. “Don’t try to hide.”

The man’s mind is a mess, like everyone’s mind is, fear and offense and who does he think he is and hux should never stand for this

Ren digs through the offended pride and the physical fear and finds the memory, watches it inside of his eyes.

Then Ren lets go, and the man drops to the floor.

“Pathetic. You were so eager for the promotion you thought would get you, so /proud/ of yourself that you gloated instead of paying attention. You listened to Dameron’s prattle and you let yourself get distracted. And now you try to pin the blame on others?” Ren snarls and the man’s throat closes again. The man’s life flickers and kicks and then – snaps.

  
The room empties, troopers dragging the corpse off. Hux remains, quietly seething. It is rare that they are both angry about the same thing, but today they are in accord.

/weak child needing validation never strong enough to stand on your own/

Ren snarls, and paces in the room. “Damned officers, more concerned about their own promotions than the good of the Order -”

“I value my career. But I don’t let it distract me when I have a prisoner in front of me.” Hux mutters. Ren snorts, tossing his hair out of his eyes. Hux’s petty aspirations are familiar.

“Hux.” Ren stops, suddenly. There is something tugging on his mind, something he’s missing, something that he can almost grasp - he knows this feeling, this is... He watches the scene he took from the officer’s mind once more, narrowing his eyes as if to see better.

“Sir?” It sounds like it wasn’t the first time he’d spoken. Ren shakes himself out of the vision.

“The traitor managed to slip the cuffs.” In his mind, he stares through the officer’s eyes down at the cuffs, open on the floor. Out of the corner of his physical vision he sees Hux nod, slowly. “Was there any physical damage to the pair he was wearing?”

Hux narrows his eyes. “No, sir. My technicians are still investigating if there was an electrical fault or coding error, but the pair passed its standard inspections three cycles before.”

His technicians, not the Order’s technicians. No matter. “Who performs inspections?”

“The stormtroopers, but they’re always recorded.” Hux flicks a stylus over his datapad. “I’ll pull the record for that pair. It’s possible the stormtrooper falsified it.”

Ren shakes his head. That’s not it, that’s not what he’s looking for. “Are all stormtroopers familiar with the cuffs?”

“....Yes, it’s a part of the standard training. Why -”

“The traitor is Force sensitive.” There it is, there’s the piece slotting into place, there’s the Force ringing with confirmation, the crystal clarity of truth dropping down his spine. Ren thinks - a blue lightsaber, held with a grace that no Force null would be capable of. “He knows how the cuffs work, and used the Force to unlock them.”

Hux is silent for a long moment. Then he exhales, his gesturing with his datapad. Exasperation, Ren thinks. It’s hard to tell without looking in his mind.

Hux swipes across his datapad again, short sharp movements like he’s dismembering a corpse. Ren hasn’t been able to get the image of Hux murdering his rivals out of his head - it should be a warning, but it doesn’t feel like one. “I’ll have the locking mechanism redesigned, as well as anything else he should be familiar with from his training record.” Another huff of breath. “It will take time. I’ll put out instructions to use alternative restraints in the meantime.”

/worthless on your own aren’t you boy/

Snoke was an old fool, just like all of the others had been, but his techniques worked. It was the only reason Ren tolerated the insults and the control, the condescension - it was worth it, any amount of suffering was worth it, until it wasn't.

But his techniques worked.

The cave where this training had first occurred was on some planet that Snoke had never named. Snoke had taken the boy, not Ben Solo but not yet Kylo Ren, knocked him out and let him awaken in darkness. Unmoored from time and physical sensation, the child was lost in the dark until he learned to breathe it.

The cave is out of reach. Ren could find it, if he truly wished, but he doesn't. Physical location is secondary - the Force is everywhere.

He claims a sensory deprivation tank from medical, blindfolding himself and plugging his ears with the Force as he sets it up and steps in. He is searching, for what he cannot yet name.

True power comes in overcoming yourself, feeding struggle into struggle, sharpening yourself against yourself. Bodily sensations are a distraction. All lives will rejoin the Force after death, and by pushing one's self to the edge of death one can touch the great ever after and all its power.

Ren drops away from gross matter and into the dark.

Around him, a hundred thousand lives glitter, the busy minded officers and the faint blur of stormtroopers. They are spots of color in the darkness - familiar, unremarkable. Little lives with little power, hardly enough to be themselves alive, much less in anything after.

For the truly powerful, the difference between life and death was hardly a difference at all.

Physicality crashes back as the sensory deprivation tank cracks and begins to drain of fluid. Ren stumbles, hits the bottom of the tank, static fuzzing through his ears as he yanks the earplugs out and the blindfold off.

The pattern of cracks in the glass is a message but Ren cannot tell what it means.

The boundary between life and death is meaningless to those strong in the Force. /I am stronger than you have ever known/ He’s always known this, Ben grew up hearing stories of his namesake speaking after his death, and yet- and yet

/you struck me down and I have become even more powerful than you could ever imagine/

Ren paces, pulls at his hair until strands come out in his hands, trying to shut up the voice, trying to think through it -

/but how can you think without me when I was the one who made your mind, there is no where you can go where you will not find me already there /

Ren stutters to a stop, his whole being twanging like a ship suddenly braked -

Crait, he thinks. Crait was messy and disastrous and - silent, the inside of his head was silent there.

/that’s why you failed there, i left you to show you what you are without me, that is what you are without me /

Ren grits his teeth. Something in the corner of his room shatters. He doesn’t know if it’s him or Snoke doing it. He focuses, breathes in and out, and thinks, Snoke is a liar, Snoke used his power, Snoke deserved to die. He thinks: Crait, the rage in his blood, the power just out of his reach, the taste on his lips of-

He lets out his breath. The room is calm. He goes to his datapad, and finds it unbroken. He puts in a request from the kitchen droids, and then waits for it to arrive. When it does, he arranges the delivery in a circle around his bed in a pattern half from memory and half from inspiration.

It is traditional, after all.

Then he steps over the line of salt on the floor, and settles on his bed. He does not sleep, not yet. Instead he lets himself drop into the fullest meditation he’s allowed himself in weeks, safe behind his warding circle.

He does not look for his mother. He does not probe the empty spot in the Force that should contain his uncle. He does not even reach out for Rey. She had refused him, demanding he be Ben, demanding he carve himself up to fit into her world. Still, what had been done could not be undone, the remnants of their connection unable to be erased - he did not want her but what was left could be used -

What he finds is-

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> chapter specific notes: torture, violence, attempted murder of an officer, sexual fantasies, sexual dysfunction, kylo is kind of sexually submissive here, paranoia


	3. Chapter 3

He drops into the nothingness that is everything, into the in-between, that thing that is himself and is everyone, he contains everything he is nothing in the everything -

-he comes up, and he has legs, and a body. He is aware, and he is not everything, and it is - strange.

He is -he is - he is himself, he is someone else, he is nameless, he has too many names -

He steps. He is somewhere he can step. He is somewhere.

He looks. He can look, can see the pale grey fog around him. He can see the infinite all around him but for once not a part of him. This is familiar and new. This is resonance, a new version of an old rhyme. This is an echo.

He steps forward. He can feel something in front of him- no, someone. Someone present, who is a rock in the flow, enveloped and yet held apart. Someone who is like him.

Perhaps it is instinct, to seek out this thing to define himself by, a reflection he can use to understand his own shape. It is easier to think of it as an instinct.

Space beneath him folds, distance infinite and nothing at all. He steps, feels light years fly beneath him - he steps and does not move at all.

The other slowly forms out of the mist - appearing half way through a step, approaching as approached -

The other looks up, and the probability wave collapses into certainty, he is observing and observed, he is aware and he is seen. He is something that can be seen, he exists -

He speaks -

"Traitor."

"Ren?"

White swirls around them. White on white on - Finn swallows, his fingers clenching and digging into his palms. He’s dreaming. He must be dreaming. He must be -

-Except it wouldn't be Ren. Why would it be Ren, this didn’t make any sense -

Ren throws up a hand, his fingers curling. A jolt of panic hits and Finn scrambles for the Force, for anything he can use to protect himself, because he knows what that gesture means, every Finalizer trooper did – he’d never felt it himself but - 

But -

\- but the Force doesn’t come.

Nothing – Finn can’t breathe, it was so easy when he was moving pieces of handcuffs, but nothing - he should have known it wasn’t going to last, and he wishes he could apologize to Rey as -

-nothing happens.

No pressure in his mind or on his throat, no taste of ozone - nothing - 

Ren’s hand drops, limp like a puppet with cut strings.

His mind is - he realizes it with a jolt like lightning that his mind is echoing with nothingness: nothing from the man in front of him, nothing from the universe and all its little lives, nothing from -

Nothing.

He breathes, air emerging in shudders. His entire body is shaking, his hands trembling at his sides, this - this isn’t -

-Everything is so quiet. Everything is quiet and still and he can’t, it doesn’t - nothing makes sense, nothing feels right, this is -

He stops, staring into the fog, because something... He shakes his head, trying to think, trying to focus through the /silence/, trying to figure out why that - 

"You're not my master anymore." He mumbles, half unaware, whispering it like a child hiding under the covers so that monsters can’t hear - He straightens, snarls, swirls to face the fog, no longer a scared boy. "You're not my master anymore!" He shouts - to anything that might be listening. Rage bubbles in his throat and he reaches for his power once more- he will rip every atom apart until he finds wherever Snoke is hiding -

The white swirls around them - matte white on pale grey, Finn realizes, not like shiny Reconditioning at all - like fog, or the sandstorms on Tattooine. The fog - shifts -

Once, in between missions and grounded because of a storm, Finn had sat in a sheltered alcove with Rey and Poe and watched the rolling storm clouds come in. Rey and Poe had amused themselves by finding shapes in the clouds, friendly bickering over whether one bit looked more like a droid or like Chewbacca.

Finn hadn’t quite understood, then, how they had seen the pictures. But watching now, he can see shapes in the fog, too detailed to be purely imaginary - a figure, tall and hunched, robes blending in with the fog, disappearing when Ren swirls to shout at it, only to reappear behind him. Then - two great claws, wrapping around Ren’s head; a darker fog into his mouth and lungs.

Finn shakes his head, trying to clear the images, but they linger in his vision like something smeared on the inside of his visor. Ren struggles against the fog, but the images twist out of his grasp before fading. Ren’s hands twitch and tremble, and Finn doesn’t understand the expression on his face, but understands the slump of his shoulders, the erosion of his posture. 

It doesn’t make any sense. None of this makes any sense. Ren wouldn’t come to Reconditioning, even as Supreme Leader, but Finn wasn’t dreaming and he was seeing things that didn’t couldn’t be real -

He bites the inside of his lip but - it doesn’t help, he still can’t tell if this is real or not, everything numb and out of sync. Maybe none of it had been real, maybe he never escaped at all, maybe he’s still -

Ren heaves a breath, and then another and another. Rage pools in his body, a current without outlet, racing through his veins and his teeth, turning into pain in clenched muscles and then back into rage, because -

Snoke isn’t here. The shadows twist out of his hands like illusions and did not respond to his fury.

He turns and is surprised to see the vision of the traitor still there and staring at him. Or - not at him, but at the fog around them, eyes jumping from one place to another.

The fog around him - Kylo Ren is a master of the Force, and has divined meaning from the shifts of the galaxy since he was a young boy, finding truth where others only saw meaningless chaos. The fog around the traitor shifts and swirls and Ren catalogs each movement -

White, infinite whiteness, shiny and distinct from the matte fog, wrapping around the man’s body, erasing his face in a haze of static- a hundred thousand figures in white, overlapping, each one the same as the others, moving as one - a flash of chrome, flickering in and out of the fog, never still long enough to identify no matter how the eye chases it.

The traitor does not struggle against the fog. His posture shifts, straightening, stiffening - and without the Force, Ren cannot interpret the flickers of the man’s expression.

The fog thins and retreats to the background. The two men are left alone with themselves , panting and trembling both, gazes meeting and then snapping away once more.

Ren - swallows. This was the traitor, who frustrated Hux so much; he defected with Dameron and fought Ren at Starkiller.

Ren barely remembers the fight. He remembers the blur of snow around him, the ache in his chest like he'd been struck through, the fury and the pain in his side - he had struck the man down and moved on, and yet, and yet.

"Why you?" He asks again. "What are you supposed to mean?" There is always a meaning, always a /lesson/, the Force does not do such things lightly -

A traitor for a traitor, he thinks, shuddering, but does not know why. He’s made peace with his actions towards his birth family. There is no reason for the Force to bring that to bear.

The traitor gapes at him that expression easy to ready at least. "What am /I/ supposed to - Look, I don't know what's going on either, all right?"

He isn't acting like a vision should, really. Ren can’t feel him in the Force, so he doesn’t know for /sure/, but – visions are something received, a message prepared or a truth presented. A recording plucked out of the Force like a datadisk from a reader. If they reacted, it was only ever a faint recognition that someone unseen was viewing them. It was never – like this.

Except with Rey, and she was no vision. Except for Rey, and she was...

“You’re real.”

“Yeah, thanks for noticing.” It sounds like Poe and Finn knows it, but there’s nothing he can do but borrow his friend’s bluster. It makes him feel less alone, in this place where he finally realizes how much he had been aware of their presence by the stark lack of them. “Look, what’s going on?”

“We are in the flow of the Force.” Ren is staring at him, almost too intense and too still. Ren glances down at his hands, fingers twitching like he wants to act, and then back up. 

Finn throws up his hands. “Well, then how do we leave? And why are we even here?”

“We are here as the Force wills it.” Before he would have said as his mas – he shakes his head to clear it of unhelpful thoughts. “But why /you/? I hadn’t -” Ren cuts himself off.

The traitor’s eyes narrow as if in thought. “...Were you trying to contact Rey?” Ren feels his expression darken. “Stay away from her!”

Ren snarls, stifled wrath snapping back and forth inside of his head, building and building. “She came to me!” The old insult twangs in his stomach like a badly healed wound. “She came to me and then she refused me and betrayed me!” Ren paces, unable to stay put, his fingers clenching and relaxing, reaching for a Force that will not come. “She had her chance to be more than my enemy and she threw it away.”

His lips pull back from his teeth. Maybe it’s a smile, but he’s never been able to tell. “Then again, you’d know all about betraying people who believed in you, don’t you?”

The traitor flinches, the barb hitting its mark. Ren swallows the flinch down, the scrap of power he feels from it. In this place, cut off from himself and everything that makes him himself, Ren is willing to scrape his nails raw for any handhold.

"Rey wanted to help you!" Finn finds himself shouting, fists clenching and shoulders leaning forward. He's angry. All of the anger he's felt lately, since Starkiller and everything else - all of the rage he didn't want to let out at the other members of the Resistance, all the emotion that built in his chest when his people weren’t safe enough – he couldn’t let it out at Rey or Poe, but -

Finn isn’t angry at Rey. She went there to save Ren, and it was reckless and stupid and she could have gotten hurt, she could have died - but he’s not, he can’t be angry at Rey for anything. But he’s still angry, and all of the anxiety and fear is lashing around inside of him like an overloaded engine core and - and he’s suddenly reminded of Canto Bright, thinking: this is he can get angry at. “She tried to save you! You owe her!”

"I didn't need saving!" Ren shouts back, leaning forward like he did on the fields of Crait, shouting at another illusion. "I offered her everything and she wanted me to go back!" He swings out a hand, calling for a Force that does not answer him. "I am finally free to be whoever I want to be. I don't owe my life to anyone. It belongs to me and no one is going to control me ever again."

Finn stares, blinking, because that doesn't make any /sense/-

-it’s not just the whole situation, it’s not just the fog and the visions – those words, said so confidently, like choosing who you want to be was a basic right that no one would deny -

Finn gapes at him until the fog snaps past them, turning his vision to static –


	4. Chapter 4

Finn wakes up gasping and tasting salt. He stares around him but all he sees is the ceiling of the Falcon above him; all he hears is the hum of the ship around him and the silence of space.

Was that real?

It - couldn’t have been real. It’s not possible.

It felt real. But it couldn’t have been. He should - talk to Rey, talk to General Organa, he should turn himself in, this is -

Rey stumbles into his berth, clearly half asleep, and Finn’s throat closes in fear, and then shame when his first thought is: she knows, she thinks I’m a spy, I let him in she hates me -

Then an alert starts blaring over the com, and he realizes that it’s something else entirely. 

He nods, and puts the - dream? - out of his mind while he rushes to help with evading the scouting patrol the Falcon was about to run into.

After they dodge the patrol, Rey and Poe disappear into the engine room of the Falcon. Apparently Poe thought the ship was responding a bit slow, and Rey agreed. Chewbacca takes watch in the cockpit, and Finn stays in the gunner’s seat, letting the adrenaline fade and staring at space.

The dream - it had to be a dream - sticks in his mind. Why Kylo Ren? He and the now-Supreme Leader had only met once, on Starkiller, but that had never shown up in his dreams before. It didn’t feel like a dream, and it didn’t make any sense as one, but it had to be one.

Just before he woke, the dream had blurred. It was disorienting, like he was suddenly seeing someone else’s vid screen, only a full body experience. It was - 

-like the smell of rot and decay and infinite age, and the smell was - in him, coating the inside of his head. It tasted power, like stims, like something on the inside of his veins coaxing them faster and stronger -

-he felt - rage, and fear, and and pressure - he smelled like rot, because it was inside of him now, he’d let it stay and now - and now a voice -

-I’ll teach you how to be who you really are, boy, but you have to obey me, you have to do what I say, you need me you’re nothing you need me they hate you you need me -

and the knowledge that he was being watched, that nothing was hidden, his mind pried open - for your own good boy how can I fix you if I don’t find out what’s wrong - and that rot and that voice reverberating inside of his head echoing over and over and over, until he’s not sure what’s him and what’s the voice, that voice that makes him better is making him perfect he just has to stop having a self and let the voice work -

Finn pulls back from the memory, fingernails digging into his hands. He swallows, tries to breathe steadily through the sudden haze of static. Maybe it was his own nightmare, after all.

But then why /Ren/?

He feels Rey coming back from the engine room, and decides in an instant that he won’t tell her. Either she thinks it’s real and thinks he’s connected with Ren and a liability, or she thinks it’s not real and he’s losing his grip and shorting out, and a liability still. Either way, she would worry.

He relaxes his hands, ignoring the nail marks in his palms, and goes down to the berth to meet her.

He’s in the woods, he thinks - in the woods, because he thought he’d be hidden in the mass of other life, that no one would find him among the trees and birds and small fury things. Except it turns out that most people didn’t look that way, they used their eyes and ears and he hadn’t thought to cover those tracks - and the ones who did look that way, who looked at life and emotion and thought, they could find him wherever he hid.

A voice called from deeper in the wood - potential, glory, I know everything about you, I can make wonderful things out of you, reshape you, don’t you want to be something different, aren’t you so sick of being pathetic -

-from behind, a half forgotten voice, telling him he’s loved just how he was -

-but the louder voice hisses that it’s a lie, no one could love you as you are, but I can make you into something lovable if you let me remake you -

Finn wakes up, panting, but he’s not sure why. He doesn’t recognize anything from the dream, not the setting or the voice. But it feels familiar, like an afterimage burned into a screen.

The dreams stick in his mind like rust beneath his nails.

The crew is on the way back from an information gathering mission, in the long hours between one place and another. Finn feels like he’s spent more time in the Falcon than he has anywhere else, except that can’t possibly be true. He can’t stop thinking, even with Rey leaning against his side -

“You saw Ren, right? On the Supremacy.” Finn isn’t sure why he’s asking. No, he does, but he doesn’t know what reason he would give Rey if she asked. “What was it like?”

“Well, it was-” Rey pauses, and then perks up. “Actually, I think I can show you.” She smiles and reaches out with her hand and the Force.

“...Downloading a memory?” Finn hazards, glancing at the readouts in his head. “Okay.”

The memory comes in stages, a simulation slowly loading around him. There is tightness around his wrists, soreness in his shoulders from struggling and in his throat from shouting -

The voice filters in last, talking about worth, about destiny, and something about it was familiar -

“Ben!” That was Rey, the sound strange through her own ears.

“You think you can turn him? Pathetic child.” The voice, where had he heard this voice before - “I cannot be betrayed, I cannot be beaten. I see his mind, I see his every intent -”

-Finn jerks out of the memory and out of Rey’s hand. He’s standing. His hands are shaking. Realizations are sparking across his mind.

Rey is staring at him.

“I -” He chokes, swallows. “I have to-”

He does what he has always done when faced with something he could not confront - he runs away.

Finn shuts down, all systems offline for an unknown amount of time. All he perceives is the fine detail on the edges of his sleeves and the sensation of his bunk under his fingertips. Everything else is out of sync, noises lagging and skipping, the Force a haze of static around him.

The voice: Snoke. The voice promising meaning and power, the voice saying it knows everything, and can see every part, telling him - not him, Finn knows now. That wasn’t his dream.

Kylo Ren, or the boy he once was.

That meant -

Finn tries to breathe. It doesn’t work.

The dream, Ren and the fog. Real. Real, and he - he didn't tell anyone - but he can hardly focus on that because -

-a master, a trainer seeing inside of him, everything he ever tried to hide laid out, nowhere to hide, nowhere to bury the disloyal feelings where officers could never see them -

He wraps his coat around himself tighter, but the sensation of exposure doesn’t fade, and with it fear, because they can’t know, no one can know, it’s the only way to be safe -

When Finn comes back to himself, his hands are aching and there are imprints of his own nails in his palms. He walks back out and finds Rey sitting where he left her. She looks up, and Finn stops breathing.

Rey looks like she’s going to cry. She - looks like she did on Tadonka, asking him to -

“Finn, I.” She sniffs. “I thought I’d hurt you somehow, or I’d - done something wrong, and you were going to /leave/-”

Finn is the worst person in the galaxy.

He’s at her side before he registers that he’s moved. He grabs her hand and wraps his own around hers, trying to - project in the Force, or whatever, to make her feel better -

“I’m not -” He doesn’t know what to say, he doesn’t have words, why can’t he - “I won’t, I promise,”

Rey swallows thickly and wraps arms around him, nods into his arm. “...Sorry for freaking out.” She mumbles.

No, no, that wasn’t - “No, you’re - It’s my fault, I’m sorry, I -” He pats her hair, awkwardly. “I freaked out first.”

Rey laughs, weakly. She swallows, and smiles up at him a little bit. “Just… stay, please?”

“Always.”

Finn is vaguely aware of the way she smells, of the press of her body against his, and thinks that maybe he should kiss her. That this is the right time to kiss her. Everyone assumes that they do that sort of thing already - Poe keeps teasing him about privacy - but -

He leans down a bit and hesitates. He’s kissed people before, when he was a stormtrooper, but that was - that was then, and they weren’t Rey, and Finn isn’t sure -

He kisses her, because maybe she’s expecting him to. He’s mostly aware of her lips, and the strangeness of someone else’s spit. She kisses back, awkward and wet. It’s… nice. Finn still doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and he feels like he should be doing more, but it’s… nice.

When he pulls back, she’s smiling, and hopefully that’s enough.

He dreams of a dark cave, or he thinks it’s a cave - it’s too dark to see anything, and sound does not echo, and he walks but does not find any walls. This space might be infinite or it might be that he isn’t moving at all, he can’t tell, his own body is slipping away from him -

He’ll be released when he learns, he’ll be himself when he learns, what is he supposed to be learning -

Rey is still furious at Kylo Ren, Finn knows. For Han Solo, for Luke Skywalker, for the hand she offered and that he didn't take.

Finn should be angry at him too, he thinks, for all of the same reasons. Rey is so much better a person than Finn, so much stronger and braver. She is light and justice. But Finn isn't angry; even when he thinks of Han Solo dying on a bridge, all he feels is sadness. All he can remember is pointing his gun at civilians and all of his fellow soldiers firing even when he couldn't.

Finn pushes up, curling up with his hands on his knees. Rey looks up from her discussion with Rose, but he waves and she goes back to it. They're bent over some part of the ship they salvaged; they claim they're making progress but Finn doesn't see it.

Finn realizes, suddenly, that he isn't angry at the other stormtroopers either. He isn't angry at Nines for calling him a traitor, or Slip for being able to fire on civilians when he couldn't, or Nova for not leaving the Order without her squad, or any of the thousands of troopers who didn't leave when he did. Finn had been desperate and selfish enough to leave without any of his squadmates, and lucky enough to find Poe and then Rey. He lept from an open airlock and was lucky enough to find breathable air. He doesn't - blame /any/ of them, for deciding the risk wasn't worth it. 

But if there was nowhere to run to? What if there was nowhere in the galaxy that was so far that he couldn't be found? What if the reconditioning officer was inside of his head, carried wherever he went?

Finn leans deeper into his knees, smelling dirt and rust, hiding his face in a way he couldn't with a helmet anymore.

No, he isn't angry at Kylo Ren. Even here in the Rebellion, Finn feels the wrong things. Maybe he wouldn’t, if he hadn’t been a stormtrooper - maybe he would be able to get angry the way Rey and Poe and Rose, then. Maybe being a stormtrooper broke something inside of him that being free isn’t going to fix. 

Even now, with Snoke gone - or at least, he thinks sharply, supposedly.

He remembers Ren in the fog, shouting at something that was almost visible.

"What're you thinking about?" Finn jerks up, startled by Rey dropping onto the bench next to him. She's sweaty, her hair tied back with bits coming loose, and grease smeared on her nose. She's beautiful, he thinks almost distantly, messy and real in a way he thinks he could spend a lifetime learning and not understand and be okay with it. "You had a pretty serious face."

Did he? He's still bad at keeping track of what his face is doing. Sometimes he misses his helmet.

He knows, instantly, that he can't tell Rey the truth. She would be worried, and worse, she would be disappointed in him. But he also can't tell her nothing; that would make her even more worried. She's been watching him very carefully, lately. He decides on a compromise.

"...Snoke is dead, right?" He asks, staring off into the distance. He can see Rey's expression shift out of the corner of his eye. Confusion, he thinks, which is okay. "I mean, I know you said Ren killed him, but -" He shrugs, awkwardly.

"Ren cut him in half," Rey adds. Finn flushes a bit in embarrassment. "And General Organa felt him die." She smiles, like she's trying to reassure him. "I asked her to make sure. Why?"

Finn shrugs again. "I was just thinking, with such a strong Force user, I wanted to be sure." It's only partially a lie, and Rey doesn't notice it. She nods along.

"Yeah, that's why I asked. She's certain."

Or at least that's what she's telling Rey. Finn nods. "Anyway. What did you and Rose decide on for the..." He blanks, and gestures with a hand towards the ship. It's not a subtle subject switch, but Rey brightens and starts explaining what they plan to do with the engine casing.

Slowly the Rebellion is growing. At first it’s only noticeable in R2’s rapid fire beeping and General Organa’s fingers swiping across a datapad. They go on fewer missions to pick up supplies and more to pick up people, moving refugees or political allies.

A man named Lando Calrissian makes contact via a holocall bounced through six different sources - it’s patchy and cuts out twice but the General seems grateful for it nonetheless.

Finn keeps having nightmares, Slip bleeding out in the sand blurring into a deep impenetrable darkness coating inside of his throat and lightning burning him alive.

Finn doesn't want to dream. But laying awake in his bed makes him twitch, feeling like he's still on the Finalizer, staying put because he's not allowed out of his bunk. So he gets up and walks around the base, sand gritting under his feet and footsteps echoing, the rough stone walls of their base under his fingertips. It feels lived in and real in a way the Finalizer never was.

The silence and emptiness calms him. The Finalizer was never quiet and never empty, even at the middle of the night. It's nice to be able to reach out with the Force and feel alone and unobserved.

He pauses, his hand on the wall. Rose is awake, and he can't tell why. He walks towards the ping on his radar, and finds her halfway into a ship with pieces spread around her. Now that he's closer, he can feel her emotions - annoyance and frustration and something he recognizes, but doesn't know the name for.

He knocks on the side of the ship, and Rose pulls herself out.

"Hi." She waves a spanner at him, friendly, her hair tied messily back, her eyes tired. There’s a smear of rust and grease on one cheek. "Can't sleep either?"

Finn sits down on the floor next to her. "Nope." He stares up at the ceiling of the hanger. "Are you okay?" Rose blinks, rubbing her eye. Finn shrugs. "I - kinda felt something going on, but I couldn't tell why. Sorry If that's -."

"No, no, you're okay. I'm just still not used to the Force stuff."

Finn laughs a little. "Me neither, really."

Rose is quiet for a long moment, her lips twisting. "...Sometimes I really miss Paige. My sister, you never met her." Finn nods, and watches as Rose reaches for a necklace that isn't there anymore. If Finn focuses, he can almost see the outline of it in the Force, like an image burned into a vid screen. 

He rubs the inside of his arm, almost without thinking.

"She - she died fighting the Order, and I can't regret it, but - sometimes I turn and expect her to be there, or I forget that she's gone." She shakes her head. "It's - nothing."

Finn thinks, sharp and sudden, that he doesn’t remember his family. He doesn’t remember anything from before the First Order, before grey walls and white armor became his entire universe. He doesn’t know if he has any siblings. 

Finn isn't sure what to do. Rose has done so much for him, taught him so many things, and he doesn’t know how to help her. He bumps his shoulder against hers, the way Poe does sometimes. Rose smiles at him, though, so maybe it's okay.

“Hey, Finn!” Finn looks up as his friend approaches. Poe gestures to a bag, something metal sticking out of it. “I finally scrounged up a set of clippers, if you still want me to sort your hair out.”

Finn touches his hair. He still can’t make it look or feel the way it’s supposed to, and brushing it out just makes it worse. He nods.

“Awesome!” Poe waves to a nearby chair, and Finn sits down in it. "All over, just shorter?" Poe asks, as if it matters. Sometimes the officers observing would make jokes asking for preferences but would give the regulation cut anyway. Finn nods. "Great, because that's what I know how to do with this kinda hair."

Finn wants to apologize, but then the clippers start up. Finn swallows, and then again, because he can't breathe - he tastes rust -

The sound isn't the same. He tries to focus on everything that isn't the same, but all he can hear is the buzz and static in his ears, all he can feel is the clippers against his skull and a layer of hair falling away.

He forces a deep breath and stays very still. Poe is talking, but Finn can't hear him over the buzz in his ears. He closes his eyes, but that makes it easier to slip away to flat grey walls and an officer frowning down at him –

There's a catch in the buzz, and then a grind, and then Poe is muttering swearwords behind him and Finn comes back to the present.

"Damn, guess these aren't any good after all, sorry bud."

The clippers broke just before they began to cut. Finn didn't mean to break them, but -

Finn can't tell. He doesn't feel anything, not the chair under his hands or the air against his skin. "You okay, buddy?"

Poe. Poe is just trying to help. Poe is waiting for an answer.

"Yeah, I'm. Yeah." Finn manages. He tries to smile, to reassure Poe, but he isn't sure he manages it. He nods, and leaves without saying anything else.

Alone in his room, he shuts the door behind him. His hand hovers over the lock. He - he wants to be alone, really alone, unobserved and hidden, somewhere where no one can reach him. But - he can't. He shouldn't. He's already been so weak today.

He pulls his hand away from the lock. He leans against the door, his hands digging into his palms until they hurt, trying to make his body feel like his own again.

Except that it isn’t, his body only exists to serve the rebellion, to protect Rey and Poe and Rose. He doesn’t get to decide what he does with it.

He touches his hair, but all he feels is static.

The missions continue, almost routine now. Supplies from one place, messages to another, refugees and blockades. It never seems to make much of a difference, but Finn doesn’t ever say that.

This time Finn, Rey, and Rose are on a riskier mission, scoping out a new Order base. Finn watches troop movements and squad patterns through a scope while Rose draws schematics of machines and ships while Rey minds the ship far behind them.

He and Rose make a good team. It’s not like working with Rey, sentences half out loud and half in the Force. But Rose is smart and quick and knows how to hide, and it’s good. They’re good together.

He thinks he understands now, what she meant before, when she apologized for kissing him, but hasn’t figured out how to bring it up. He doesn’t want what he has with Rey with anyone else, but.

Finn notices something in his mind, but ignores it. He can’t tell what’s a message from the Force and what’s just a short in his brain.

A squad passes in front of his sights - no, not a full squad, only three members. Finn narrows his eyes as he watches through the scope. He recognizes something about them, but he isn’t sure what.

The leader turns his direction. Finn feels the prickling sensation of exposure, of being seen - they’ve a lot of close calls, of being seen and then discounted, but -

“We’ve been spotted,” Rose hisses, making movements to get up.

“Wait.” Finn holds out a hand. He’s not afraid and he’s not sure why. “Just. Wait.”

Maybe he’s dooming them both, maybe this is the wrong decision, maybe he -

The trooper stares at the place where he is and he stares back through his scope, and they point their gun at the ground and take a step forward. The other troopers follow suit.

“Finn!” Rose makes a movement for her side arm - Finn grabs her arm without looking. The Force, he thinks. He hopes.

“They’re not planning on shooting us. Having guns pointed down like that is against regulations when you’re approaching a target.” The troopers are close now, close enough that Finn puts the scope aside. He thinks about standing, but the trooper in the lead shakes their head very slightly, and tilts their helmet half a degree to the left. Finn glances that direction. Surveillance, right.

He waits as the troopers approach, focusing his mind on the cameras to make sure they’re not noticed. He doesn’t feel any danger, even though he probably should, but Rey is too far away to check for him - but he doesn’t hear the roar of the Falcon either -

They’re close. Finn keeps his eyes fixed on the Troopers visor. The second trooper shifts just enough to create a blind spot, so Finn stands. Rose stands behind him, her arms crossed.

“I’m - it’s me, Nova.” The front trooper gestures to their fellows. “Spitz, Lucky. I - I don’t know if you remember - “

Finn nods very quickly. “I do.” That’s where he recognized the movement. He can’t hope, he doesn’t want to, but -

Spitz steps forward. “Can we-?” They shakes their head, straightens their posture. Their movements are quicker than Nova’s, less considered and efficient. “We want to come with you. To the Resistance.”

Spitz turns out to be a young woman, with rapid fingers and coloring almost like Hux’s - pale skin and hair either red or gold, though it’s too short to tell. Nova sticks close to her, her skin darker, her hair a black smear over her head. Lucky is a young man, younger than the others, looking like Spitz’ younger sibling. They pile into the storage area of the Falcon while Rose and Rey make reports back to base.

“We don’t have a fourth, we’ve been down a trooper for ages.” Spitz keeps fidgeting her helmet as she talks, half aborted movements like she’s going to put it on out of habit and then stops herself. “We keep making reports about it, but with how things have been lately….”

“So who’s in charge, now?” Finn asks. “They haven’t announced anything.”

Sptiz tugs on a loose bit of her undershirt. “AZ -” She shakes her head. “Headshot. She had been a sergeant before, and she’s fine, but they’re doing some - she’s sharing command with one of the officers? And you can tell that they don’t get along, I don’t know why they’ve…”

They spend the trip back to base discussing the Order and the program. It’s technically information gathering, Finn justifies, but inside his mind - where no one present can look - he admits that it’s nice to talk about things from a world he knows, with people whose mannerisms he understands.

It’s Nova who finally asks, the first thing she’s said in some time. Her dark eyes meet his. “You killed her. On the Supremacy, you killed Phasma.”

Finn swallows. He wishes he were that sure.

“I saw her go down into the fire. I don’t think anyone could survive that.”

Except Phasma, he thinks.

The stormtroopers stand at attention in front of General Organa. Nova stands the regulation distance away from Spitz. Spitz does not fidget.

General Organa glances over the squad, and Finn feels the searchlight of her attention sweep out like a blaster beam. Then she nods. He does not know what she has seen, but it seems to be enough to accept them.

“Are there others who wish to join?”

Spitz swallows. Her eyes flick to General Organa and then Finn and then down. “We think so. We wouldn’t talk about it, amongst ourselves, but I believe so, yes.” She swallows again. “Troopers aren’t normally trained as pilots, so opportunities are limited.” 

General Organa hums, and Finn cannot tell what she’s thinking.

“I see.” She folds her hands in front of her. “Talk to Poe about rooms, and we’ll see about getting you into the duty rotation soon. You’re dismissed.”

Nova’s tilts her head in his direction as they leave, a gesture of attention and support for being left alone with the officers. General Organa nods, seemingly to herself, and types a number on her comm.

“Lando. I have a proposal for you….”

A lot of the details fly over Finn’s head. At one point, he’s sent to fetch Rey and Rose, and more technical information is exchanged. Finn occasionally answers questions about what the Stormtroopers have access to, but most of the conversation is a mystery to him. As best he can follow, they want to find a way for stormtroopers willing to defect to actually get to the Rebellion without compromising the security of the base.

Finn is eventually dismissed properly, Rey and Rose still deep in conversation about the technical details.

A few days later, he's given instructions: if he encounters a stormtrooper willing to defect, he can either take them with him there and drop them off at an arranged location, or pass along a simple comm that would allow them to contact Lando directly without being picked up by surveillance.

"I mean, ideally it would be better to get something on a shipboard system, but the surveillance is probably too good for that." Rose explains, handing over a stack of the simple comms. "But this is a place to start."

General Organa tells him to use his discretion, and Finn swallows, and nods.

Soon they pick up people on most missions, and Finn starts to notice the signs even when they don’t join up - the gun pointed away, the eye contact made and then broken without acknowledgment. Sometimes, he passes along the comms.

It makes him feel something, deep inside of his chest, but he doesn’t know what.

Calrissian sets up space stations and General Organa sets guidelines for Stormtrooper's acceptance into the Rebellion. Spitz, Nova, and Lucky go to one of these stations to assist, and Finn tries not to worry about them.

There’s a dozen, now, full squads and pairs. They’ve been cleared by Lando’s screening and General Organa has accepted them in. None of them are tall enough to be Phasma, but the thought is never far from Finn’s mind. He keeps looking for her, his gaze snagging on any chrome.

She has to be alive. There’s no way he could have killed her.

Phasma isn’t the sort of person who dies.

After two weeks, General Organa calls a meeting of all of the troopers who have been cleared, and she wants Finn there.

Finn- baulks. There’s - there’s so many of them, and they all want to see him, except - not him, some version of him that doesn’t exist, the one the Order never touched, who’s braver and, and, _functional_, who isn’t shaking like an overloaded droid, who -

He swallows, once and then again. It doesn’t help. He feels himself slipping, a little bit, reality fading. This time he lets it, doesn’t try to stay connected. If it isn’t real, then he won’t feel anything and he might be able to do this. He misses his helmet.

He wipes his sweat off of his hands and walks into the room.

“You’re welcome to stay and fight, but not obligated. Your lives are your own.” General Organa says. All of the troopers are watching Finn, though, obvious without their helmets. Finn can read their thoughts even without the Force. Does she mean it, and what does it even mean?

But not all of them looked at him like a fellow trooper. Some of them looked at him like he was a captain, one of us but not. Someone who might be on our side against the officers, but might not. A little awed, and a little nervous.

Like he was Phasma.

If he could feel anything, he would have started shaking again.

He doesn’t remember the rest of the speech. Just walking out at the end and -

Finn knows how to be invisible. He knows how to make it so that no one notices him, how to hide -

\- So he does. He walks very calmly past the shipyard and the barracks to a place deep in the maze of the base. He tilts the cameras away without thinking.

He sits on the floor, in the dust and rust. He can’t breathe. He can’t breathe, and his hands are shaking, and -

-he blanks again, like his visor has shorted out, his audio is dead, the only input coming through is static. A broken droid that cannot fulfill its assigned function, or the function it was re-purposed to. Only good for collecting rust in the corner.

“- inn. Finn!”

The static resolves into Rey. He can’t tell what her face is doing. He’s not surprised she found him. Rey is good at finding hidden things.

“I’m fine,” he says, automatically.

“You’re not though.” Her face shifts into something he understands a bit more as she slumps down across from him. She looks miserable. “You’re not okay and I don’t know how to help you.”

Finn looks away, because he’s a coward. “You shouldn’t – you’ve got more important things to worry about.” He wants to absolve her, make her understand that he is not -

“You’re important!” She’s angry. He hadn’t meant to make her angry. “I can’t do this without you!”

His throat seizes up again. His weakness will ruin everything, just like he always knew.

“No, I didn’t mean -” Suddenly, Rey is crawling into his lap, fitting into the space between his legs and wrapping her arms around him. “I mean I – you’re important to me. I don’t want to do this without you.” She grabs his hand, lacing their fingers together. “I don’t want to ever leave you behind again.”

Finn gives in, and leans into her. She smells like sand and oil.

“...I’m sorry I’m not okay.”

He’ll talk to General Organa soon, he decides. Whatever she does to him will be worth it, if it means he’ll be fixed.

“My life is my own”, Kylo Ren said. Finn shakes his head, and leans further into Rey’s shoulder. Kylo Ren says a lot of things that don’t make any sense.

The boy is young, and hungry, and scared but only in a vague, distant sort of way. Things go wrong but they are always a step removed. He is young, too young to understand what the ships in the sky mean.

He waves at the men in stiff uniforms who talk with the grown-ups in tense whispers. He chases other children around in the street and is chased in turn, a laughing exchange of friendly competition. There is a small furry thing that comes to his house at night, and he thinks it might stay, that the grown-ups will let him feed it, though he isn't sure what to name it.

He is young, and his life is not easy but it is free; he is given kind words and companionship without demands. He is young and hungry but hopeful yet, excited for the future. Maybe he'll be a farmer like papa, or a mechanic like auntie. He hasn't decided yet, and anything is possible.

Finn wakes up and for a moment feels the crushing weight of what could have been on his chest. Then the weight shifts, and it's Rey. She's started sleeping in his room, sometimes. He's not sure he minds or not.

"Finn, are you okay? Was it a nightmare?"

Suddenly, Finn realizes his cheeks are damp.

"No. I was.... remembering, I think."

Rey nods, and curls up next to him again. She wraps one hand around his arm and doesn't let go. It takes Finn a long time to fall asleep again. His throat is tight with something he doesn't know how to name or describe.

He doesn’t know what planet he’s from. He doesn’t remember his parents, or his childhood friends, or if he has any siblings.

He doesn’t remember what his name used to be. Who he was supposed to be.

This snippet of memory is no comfort. All he feels is - grief, he thinks it is called. Grief, or something like it, something that coats the inside of his chest - the knowledge of something lost forever, only appreciated in retrospect. Something that has been eaten by rust and can never be repaired.

Rey shifts against him, and he wraps an arm around her, and tries sleep again.

The ship lies in piles around the workspace, rusted struts and burnt out thrusters. It’s a waste of time that Rey and Poe and Rose are sinking effort into because they’re - too kind to get rid of something worthless.

Maybe it’s good for scrap, something to be torn apart and used up. But that’s all.

Finn sends a message to General Organa for reconditioning, and then walks to his bunk and dreams of white walls and dark caves and never being good enough for anything.

Several days pass without any missions, and then General Organa calls him in.

General Organa gestures to a chair across from her. It’s repurposed, like everything else is here, and potentially older than he is. Even in an office that used to be a storage room, dust in every corner, she holds herself sturdy and unshakable.

“You’re not in trouble,” she starts as he sits down. He believes her, but there’s a datapoint in the Force, something he doesn’t understand. “I just want to clarify a few things.”

She folds her hands. There is something in her expression that he does not understand, read outs in the force that make no sense. He has seen these data points, but never directed at him.

“One of the most difficult things, I’ve found,” she says, very calm. Even the odd sensation in the Force was calm: information on the headset that did not blare an alarm but needed attention, all the same. “Is when people converse and both walk away feeling understood, and yet neither of them have been because neither realized that they were using the same words to mean different things.”

Finn nods, feeling as though it is expected.

“When you were captured and escaped with the assistance of Nova, you mentioned ‘Reconditioning’.” Finn nods again. “You had defined it, at the time, as retraining. I had accepted this and did not ask further.” She lets out a breath. “I have since realized that I should have.”

“Ma’am?” Finn asks, blinking. He’s gotten used to officers admitting that they’re wrong, here, though he struggles to believe it.

“Finn.” She says. Her eyes find his like search lights. “Explain to me the process of Reconditioning in the Order.”

Finn blinks again, but nods. He notices, distantly, that his hands are trembling and sets them firmly down on his knees to hide it.

He closes his eyes for a moment, and describes the process to her. He talks about being separated from the squad and being taken to a Reconditioning Center, where an officer would do the assessment. At her prompting, he describes the assessment: questions to determine whether he understood the nature of his infraction and if he was willing to be corrected. His voice is steady and calm, like a droid reading out reports. He does not feel anything. He does not check if his hands are still shaking.

“How were you corrected?”

He talks about the room with white walls and white floors, where the door disappears as soon as it closes; the lights that never dim, the speakers that echo without source and the sense of time warping and stretching.

His hands are not shaking.

He breathes, and does not taste rust.

“And when you asked me for retraining - that is what you expected me to do?”

Her face is still showing emotions he doesn’t understand. He feels like he’s failed somehow, but it can’t imagine how. He shakes his head.

“No, ma’am.” Her expression doesn’t change. “I expected you would do it with the Force.” Here, her expression shifts; here, she blinks, just once.

“Explain.”

Now it’s his time to blink, but an order is an order.

“With the Force you can enter people’s minds. It would be simple for you to discover any disloyalty or weaknesses.” Her expression flickers again. “Reprogramming would be much simpler as well.”

She would be able to - remake him, pull apart every piece that made him weak, search through his mind and find -

-nowhere to hide -

-Now, he feels. Now it is not just his hands shaking, but his shoulders, his chest, his blood. Now, his voice catches on the inside of his mouth, his throat tight, he - he can’t talk, he has to talk, he’s been asked a question, he can’t -

-He recognizes the sensation, his brain shorting, a moment too late to hide it. He swallows, and he wants to hide, but hiding would just make it worse -

-She can fix him, he thinks, a little desperate. That’s what he asked for, after all, for her to use the Force to remove these broken circuits in his brain. General Organa would be kind, he knows. He trusts her to make it as painless as it can be, to only take out what she has to.

He’s still scared.

The selfish part of him wants to bolt, wants to grab Rey and Rose and Poe and run somewhere the Order could never touch them. But they would never leave with him, not when there was a battle yet to fight. He will do whatever is necessary to end the Order and protect them. If that meant letting his mind be carved up and reassembled like a repurposed droid, then -

-then, he would -

-then -

-Words come through the static, the sharp tone of command registering before anything else. “Finn. /Breathe/.”

An order. He draws in a breath, and then another. He focuses on the basic mechanical act, breathing in and out, until his vision stops greying out.

“Finn.” General Organa looks very tired in a way she hadn’t before. “Your mind is your own. I will never alter it, nor will I enter it without express permission freely given. I understand why you expected otherwise. ” He stares at her. Her aura in the Force is muted and grey - he is suddenly reminded of an old injury, healed but still there, or a break in a pipe that would never be erased no matter how well it was mended. “But rewriting someone’s mind, no matter how it is done, is a gross violation your rights as a sentient person. Winning a war isn’t worth it.”

Finn’s readouts are blank. He swallows. He opens his mouth, but he doesn’t know what to say.

“I would let you. If I could keep people safe, it, it would be worth it.” That is what makes his voice crack again, and he doesn’t know why.

“It wouldn’t keep you safe, Finn. If I were to violate someone in that way -” She shakes her head. “I would be no better than the Order. There are boundaries that must not be crossed, even for the sake of a greater good.” He still doesn’t - her mouth twists. “And I have seen the aftermath of people who tried. Changing things with the Force only makes things worse.”

Finn stares down at his hands for a long minute. General Organa lets him.

“So if you can’t fix me with the Force, how -” He doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  
“Time, specialists, practice.” He looks up. Her expression is something he cannot read. “None of which we have at the moment.” She lets out a breath. There is a meaning to all of these gestures but he does not understand it. “In the meantime, we will work around it. Keep Rey and Poe informed on your status.”

Finn nods. “Thank you ma’am.” He understands completely. The rebellion is still short on resources. A broken tool is better than no tool at all. At least he’s useful and not a burden - he’s not sure he could handle that.

General Organa watches him and he still doesn’t understand her expression. It’s almost sad.

“Get some rest, Finn. You’re off duty for the rest of the day.”

Finn thinks that maybe he should go to Poe and update him, call Rey and explain. Apologize to them for being the way he is. But Rey is off training in the Force, and at this exact moment, he feels… tired. Neither of them would understand - and he’s glad, he’s happy that neither of them know what this feels like. But they’re both so strong, and Finn cannot bear the burn of their light or of their lack of understanding.

There is someone who does understand, he thinks, almost amused. Someone who knows what it’s like to have everything about you rewritten, who chased shadows and jumped at reflections. Who killed the person who defined their universe and still saw their shadows everywhere.

He thinks of being willing to do - anything, if it means he’ll be fixed. If it means the pain will stop.

He lays in bed and watches the Force flicker and thinks, “Yeah, okay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content notes: disassociation, ptsd, the author projecting heavily on Finn, panic attack associated with non consensual hair cuts, attempted self destruction though the pov character does not acknowledge it as such


	5. Chapter 5

Ren wakes up and stares around the room as if it is unfamiliar to him. Nothing in the room is broken. The line of salt around his bed has not been disturbed.

Something inside of him has shifted nonetheless.

He stands. He stands at the inside edge of the salt and does not move for a moment, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth. He stares at the salt and breathes and cannot make himself step over. 

He closes his eyes, and he is on the walkway once more; he is once more frozen, knowing what he had to do but unable to do it.

He opens his eyes again. He is strong enough.

He steps over the line, towards the datapad on the other side of the room.

/weakling you need me/

A light above him shatters and he grits his teeth. Picks up the datapad anyway.

Ren stares down at the datapad and thinks of the vision he saw, in the fog.

White on white on white, white rooms with white floors and white walls; long hours kept awake, lights never dimming; the only words allowed are procedures and loyalty and the words of the oath - the Oath of the Order, he thinks.

It was -

Observers in every corner, no one was a confidant because if they wanted the best for you they would turn you in. It was the echoing loneliness, the gut deep knowledge that there was something /wrong/ with you but being terrified of what being fixed would mean. It was terror, a terror so familiar that it was almost numb, almost unremarkable, and shame, for not being good enough, for not wanting the right things, for not being who you were supposed to be-

Ren comes out of the memory with a tight throat. Without thinking, he pulls up information on his datapad. The stormtrooper program, but there’s so much information, too much for him to process at once, and he doesn’t know where to start.

Perhaps… Perhaps he had gotten it all wrong. Rey refused him because Rey wasn’t the one he was looking for, Rey refused him because she wasn’t the right one to ask.

He’d thought she was his match, his mirror, the only one who could defeat him. He’d thought that she would understand him, that they were broken in the same ways. He’d thought he understood her, that he recognized himself in her. But he dove into her sands to find any resemblance a mirage, an illusion built by his own desires. 

But this - this was no mirage. He’d been foolish to discount the tra- Finn, he thinks.

An early meeting, early enough that Hux is suspicious of his motives, as if Ren could ever hope to catch him off guard by something so human as sleeplessness. It was the first chance Ren had to speak with him. Ren is pacing in his office, the idea gripping his mind too tightly to try work on anything else, when Hux enters and bows, short and sharp as he always does.

“Hux.”

“Sir.”

Ren stops pacing and draws a breath. Touches the salt in his pocket with the Force.

“Tell me how the stormtrooper program works.”

Hux politely blinks. A dozen thoughts flicker across his mind, too fast and too hidden for Ren to read. What he says, though, is: “All of it, sir?”

Ren feels his face twist into a scowl. “No, I want -” He gestures with one hand, a datapad shifting on his desk. He’s not sure what he wants - isn’t that what he has assistants for? “Training methods. Conditioning. Things like that.”

Hux’s expression twitches, just a little. Ren can hear - or imagine - the sarcastic response in Hux’s mind. But Hux only inclines his head.

“I’ll have the files sent to your datapad.”

Ren’s lip curls, a barely restrained snarl. Files, files, endless files - “And tell Headshot and -that officer to meet with me.” 

His first priority must be Snoke. His first priority must be to ensure that his own mind is secure, unaltered and uncontrolled. There is no point to anything else - all his freedom and power would an illusion without it.

Ren draws careful patterns of salt around him, and drops down into the Force. He will find Snoke no matter where he hides, he will dig into every molecule and nowhere will be unreachable to him - 

He is untouchable, he is infinite, he is alpha and omega, black hole and burning star.

This, this is his destiny, this is what he had been denied under both his masters - cowards who sought to destroy that which they could not control - but they could not destroy him anymore than they could break him to their molds - he is unshapable, he is unbreakable -

/are you really boy, I broke you I’m breaking you -/

Ren drops out of meditation gasping. Salt crystals lay in shards around him. His lips are bleeding.

He still does not have an answer.

A nightmare, but – Ren’s nightmares have always been even, when he wasn’t Ren - his nightmares have always been things of dark shadows and pressure and the smell of ozone and burnt flesh. This nightmare – this one is white on white on white, blankness, a terror that has no external source and a suffocating feeling of exposure, a voice that echoes from every point in the room -

He wakes, his blood racing with fear that feels unfamiliar. It was not a vision, and yet. 

It occurs to him, watching standard training from an observation room: before looking into Headshot’s mind, he had never looked into a stormtrooper’s mind. They were nonentities on the Finalizer, blank faces and blank minds. Barely more than droids.

He thinks of the droids of his childhood, of the droid that dodged their attention with the map to Skywalker, and curses his own foolishness.

He should have. But the past is dead, no matter how many times he has to kill it, and so he looks now.

He breathes in the dark for a long moment. At first, he can barely distinguish between them and can only perceive them as a collective, a sea of minds trained into conformity. He thinks of Headshot, her mind like an even pool.

He breathes out power. Looks deeper, watches closer. There, one thinking about their latest sim scores; another thinking about an injured squad mate; another speculating on the strip of skin she saw when a trooper across the mess hall had adjusted his gloves.

Ren jumps from mind to mind to mind, getting a taste of each - a flicker of ambition, the ache of sore muscles, fantasies of food and sex and sleep - he's not even sure quite what he's looking for. The glow of a Force sensitive mind, maybe, or the taste of rot and old parchment.

He rubs his fingers over a salt crystal in his pocket without thinking.

What he finds is fear. A sort of background radiation of anxiety, a low level whisper of 'what if someone's watching what if i'm not good enough what if they find out how weak i am wha if-'

It feels - it feels like -

He wrenches himself out of it, feeling the sharp fire of Hux approach. Hux burns away whatever thought Ren was about to have, and for once Ren welcomes it. There will be time for reflection later.

Hux steps closer, his mind a primed blade as always. “Supreme leader, may I ask…”

Ren cuts him off, the shape of the question visible in the Force before it’s spoken. “There was no testing for Force sensitivity among stormtroopers. The traitor is sensitive. I want to know if there are others.”

Hux pauses. Ren is still breathing with the Force and he can feel Hux’s acknowledgment of the validity of the tactic, though nothing of the sort appears on his face. It feels like validation, like praise, and it drips down his spine like warm oil.

“I see, Sir.” A pause. “I believe, in the old republic, there was a test…”

Ren nods. “Midocholirians. The technique has been lost.”

“Unfortunate.” Of course Hux would prefer a mechanical test. “If you find any, what are your plans, sire? A specialized unit?”

Ren inclines his head. “Perhaps. First I need to be sure that they are not in contact with anyone else.” Hux’s pale eyebrows go up. Ren nearly smirks at being able to surprise him. He is drenched in warmth, breathing it in, a high no drug can reproduce. “A Force sensitive individual could communicate with others in ways that signal blockers cannot stop. My m - Snoke communicated thus with me many times.” If Hux notices his slip he doesn’t comment. “It is unlikely that there are any strong enough to be in contact with the resistance, but I want to be sure.”

It is only a half a lie. Ren is looking for other things – why the Force has connected him to Finn, what meaning this will reveal. The Stormtrooper program is the key to /something/, Ren knows it, but what he does not know yet. He can only see the edges of it.

Hux breathes in through his nose, and then nods sharply, like it pains him. It probably does, each scrap of approval hard won, and Ren cherishes each one, tucked in his mind like kyber crystals. He is powerful, he is brilliant, he is infinite. No one in the galaxy can define him or limit him and he will be everlasting, he will be evermore, nothing will ever be out of his reach –

“That will be all,” He says, and Hux bows and departs.

Ren signed off on the second commander, so no matter how much he would like to, he cannot claim insubornation or manipulation and reverse direction without losing face in front of the Order /how dare you consider the view of such pathetic -/ or Hux. /can't bear to disappoint him can you -/

Salt flows around him in a pattern. Across the desk from him, Hux's eyes twitch but he says nothing.

"Tarkin is an overly ambitious ass." Ren says, having discarded a dozen arguments. "And a split command is asking for trouble."

Hux stares at him, as if hearing all of the arguments he's not saying. "You can't remove him without the Imperials revolting. His appointment was the only thing that kept them from outrage when you put a Trooper in charge."

"Your father put Phasma in charge." Ren isn't sure why he says it. It feels petty.

Hux huffs. "My father was one of them, and they trusted him in a way they don't trust us." The 'us' makes something in Ren's chest clench /weakling weakling weakling/. "They need to feel that their interests are being represented, and you've already made that difficult enough."

"You're the one who suggested her." Ren says, still feeling petty. "If she was such a bad choice, then why even put her forward?"

/you trusted him you trusted him like a child you/

The salt pattern falters. A moment's concentration sets it flowing again.

"Because she was the only one who puts the good of the Order over her own rank." Ren blinks at him. "I didn't think they would be this upset over it. And there's no way to remove him without them throwing a fit."

"So instead I bow to pressure?" It comes out sarcastic. Hux lets out a breath, and Ren can't tell what Hux thinks of that. "Look, I'm already looking into the stormtrooper program. Call it - a probationary period, or something." He waves a hand vaguely and the salt flows around his hand. "Looking at how to integrate the two approaches. So they know I have an eye on their pick."

It doesn't feel like a solution. But Hux narrows his eyes, and nods.

Headshot and Tarkin stand in the hallway outside of Ren's office. Ren makes them wait, though he's the one who summoned them - he spends a few minutes skimming their minds when they do not know he is there.

Tarkin, as arrogant as before, resenting that he has to share command with a Trooper plucked from the wastes of the Unknown regions, resenting that his command was denied him and had to be Corrected afterwards - everything that Ren expected to find.

Headshot, however... Ren frowns with closed eyes as he looks into her mind. It is - different. Her mind is not a calm pool. Flashes of annoyance at Tarkin, concern for her troopers - hers, she thinks and Ren notices it - in the hands of someone who doesn't understand them; and then, like the flicker of a fish, she remembers Ren looking into her mind and in a moment it is again a calm pool.

He does not know if she felt his intrusion, or merely remembered that he could - and it does not matter.

He opens his eyes and frowns. Stormtroopers are not taught how to repell mental intrusion, and also that is not, quite, what she did. Shielding would be noticable - Hux's mind was a locked door - but if he had not watched her do it, he would not have noticed there was anything amiss. An act of impressive mental self-control.

All the more indication that she was the one who should be running the program. Unless...

Ren shakes off the thought, and calls them in.

"Tell me your plans for the program."

Ren arrives to the stormtrooper training area on the Finalizer unannounced. Hux knows where he is, but Hux always knows. An officer jumps to attention but Ren waves him down.

Ren has watched the memory of Finn’s capture a dozen times. The officer involved /should/ have noticed what they were doing. Ren dug into his mind, rooting out any corruption or arrogance - and what he found was arrogance plenty, but woven in was a sort of blur.

Finn is force sensitive, Ren thinks. And stormtroopers learn how to hide if they are being watched.

Ren tries it, something he has not tried in earnest since before he was Ren, a boy too strong in the Force to be hidden from any who could look.

/you were destined to be found you are destined you cannot hide from me/

Ren snarls, shakes his head to clear it. He is no longer the boy that did not exist. So he tries what he once tried - bends everyone’s gazes away, adjusts the vision of a hundred soldiers. But no, that isn’t right, that isn’t what Finn had done -

/still only a copy aren’t you/

He will learn the techniques of his enemies. He failed once by assuming he understood. He will not fail again.

A deep breath, a refocus. He focuses, not on changing the view of others but changing himself. For a single paralyzing moment he is struck with the memory of trying to make himself be Ben when he wasn’t / never escape the past boy never/ but he forces himself through it. He is stronger now.

He is not there. He is invisible. He is a shadow, he is a breath of wind, he is nothing. It is - easy, it is too easy, it is familiar-

/step away from yourself, empty yourself the way I taught you and allow me to fill every space inside of you, you are nothing, you are nothing nothing nothing noth-/

He snaps out of it. A light above him flickers. His breath is unsteady. His hands clench, fingers digging into his palms. He is real, he is himself, he is, he is. He bites the inside of his lip and the pain grounds him in his own body. Risky. Too risky. He has fought too long to be himself to let go of it now.

/so scared of me boy you always were always will be/

He will find another way. There is no one he needs to hide from anymore, no one who would dare challenge him. It is no matter. None at all.

His hands shake, tightly clenched, until he walks out.

Places of death hold power. Places of death and places of killing, both. This always has been true and always will be.

As a child, the boy others had called Ben Solo had been taken to the field of asteroids that had once been Alderaan. It was a painful place, overwhelming his senses and making him weep long before he trully understood what had happened there. He has not yet visited the site of the Hosnian Cataclysm, the area far too radioactive to justify visiting, but he thinks he would feel the same - pain and death and /power/.

Kylo Ren has slain the boy Ben Solo, and so carries his own death inside of him and all its power with it, ever killing and ever slaying, a sacrifice of himself to himself. Such was the power that his life had been built of. Killing Snoke and claiming his throne was to claim the power of his life and his death.

But the power must belong to himself, and him alone. That was the mistake of Snoke and of Palpatine before him - wielding power through others and not contained in their own self.

Ren stands before the throne where Snoke died and for a long moment, he does not breathe. For a long moment he is wrapped in memory, electricity teasing at his fingers and old insults ringing in his ears.

The Force is thick with darkness here. Ren breathes it in and our, riding the waves of afterimages, of everything he'd suffered at Snoke's feet. But it had made him powerful, enough to overthrow the one who had done such things to him. Snoke had done as he had promised and through him Ren had become strong enough that no one would ever own him again.

Ren snarls. He lifts the bag of salt he brought and rips one corner. He closes his eyes and moves the Force by instinct until the bag is empty.

He opens his eyes. The pattern of salt on the floor surrounding the throne is the symbol of the Order, inverted - the spikes pointing out instead of in. It looksi right that way. Correct.

Ren steps over the line of salt, and the galaxy seems quieter.

/can never keep me out/

Next, his office.

  
  


“Tell me about the traitor.”

Headshot stiffens. Her mind is a careful blank. Many troopers are, to his face or the face of officers. Some thrum with nervous energy and fear – but many are simply blank if they know they are being watched. Even the ones who do not know or believe in the Force do this. It is incredible.

No wonder Finn learned how to hide, Ren thinks. No wonder he was hidden for so long.

“You trained with him. Phasma’s officer core.” Headshot nods, once. “Tell me about him.”

Headshot gives a sharp and professional report, listing his achievements in sims and spars.

Her mind is clear and unclouded. She is professional and direct, without emotional input or bias. She says nothing that is not available in his file.

Headshot finishes, and only here does a flicker of emotion come through. “He was supposed to be the best of us, sir. We will all be more careful to root out any noncompliance among us.”

Ren does not dismiss her, though she clearly expects it. Instead he watches her, on the other side of a line of salt surrounding his desk.

After a moment:

"Why do you think he defected?"

This startles her. Her mind spikes with surprise and fear for a moment and then returns to calm.

"Sir, in the report on the incident -"

"I've read the report." He has, politicized drivel that it is. "I want to know what you think."

Headshot pauses. She is silent and her iron control of her own mind loosens, just enough that he can watch her turn over events in her mind and not come to any conclusion.

"I - Sir, I don't know." She's afraid to admit this. But Ren just nods, and dismisses her.

  
  
  


Ren spends days in meditation, letting Hux do the mundane administration. The only way to be sure, truly and utterly sure, would be to enter every mind on the ship, or even the galaxy, at once - no sentient untouched, no secret hidden, no hole left to conceal Snoke from his gaze.

But he is not strong enough. He cannot do what he needs to do. He rages and snarls from the inside of his salt circle, bites open his knuckles and lets the blood drip onto the salt. 

He cannot - he is too -

/you cannot escape/

He tears out a chunk of hair and lets the pain ground him. He will do whatever he has to. He tugs at the split skin on his knuckles with his other hand as he paces around the circle, trying to think through the snarling wind inside of his head.

Think. He cannot look in everyone at once. He catches himself on that thought, snarling and angry, considering giving up and surrendering to death, and then refuses it. Go in sweeps, then: decide who Snoke would find most useful or convenient and investigate them first. High command, bridge staff.

Fleeing from one mind to another would leave traces, evidence, gaps in the psyche left behind from where he hid. Ren might be able to - no, he is able to find those gaps. A hunter seeking his prey. He is the hunter, the terror in the night, the wolf in the wild.

He calls a datapad to his hand and starts up a list of priorities.

Tarkin salutes. He does not bother trying to shield his mind, and his ambition and arrogance ooze out and drip over him.

Ren does not frown. He does not strangle the brat for not acknowledging the power of his commander. He grips his salt crystal in his hand.

"Tell me about the traitor." Tarkin blinks at him, mock polite, but Ren doesn't let him speak. "What would you have done to prevent it?"

That is enough to set the man off on a speech, full of political plays and veiled insults to his predescors, manuevering that might have worked if Ren had been watching his words and not his mind. There is talk of a more aggressive reconditioning program with earlier intervention, of closer tracking. A passive aggressive mention of Unified Leadership, as though Phasma was not a force unto herself.

The nature of that complaint is clear, of course. Phasma ruled the stormtroopers with a chrome fist, but she was a Trooper, and so all her faults were laid at the fact that she was not an officer.

"I agree," Ren says, surprising the man. "It is important to maintain a unified front, which is why I am investigating the program to determine the path forward."

It is not the approval the man takes it as, but that doesn't matter.

Ren is on his knees on his bed, hand on his own cock. He's alone, but he's pretending he isn't, pretending that there's someone watching, stroking his hair, telling him he's a good boy -

He bites into his pillow. The figure in his head wavers - Phasma, sometimes, stern and uncompromising, or Hux with his leather and his sneer.

It's Hux today, his rare smiles that still feel like an insult, telling him that he's been a good boy, that he's done well, so very well, so - 

/well done, my apprentice, you have earned your place, you are worthy /

He pulls away from the pillow, gasping, his hand dropping away. He rolls onto his back. His breath stutters and jumps like a broken holo.

He stares at the ceiling of his room. He wants to tear his own skin off, but does not. It won’t help. It’s under his skin, the corruption of even this physical instinct, where mere touch cannot purify.

Ren steps into an Observation room, an officer at his side. Ren barely cares which one, and barely listens to the officer talking - he is here to watch Reconditioning.

Suddenly he recognizes Finn’s nightmare. Because it must have been his, these images too precise and familiar. The white on white on white, the sense of time slipping, the sourceless voice echoing -

The officer is still talking.

“We vary when they receive meals and other scheduled events, as well as length of lights on and lights off. This has the eventual effect of causing them to distrust their internal perceptions and rely more on what they are told on a very basic biological level. From there, it becomes much easier to control their perceptions and interpretations on higher levels.”

Ren is barely listening. Ren is barely there. He is -

\- In a cave without light, either so large as to be infinite or so small that he can barely fit, he. He has no way of knowing, sound does not echo, if he steps he does not reach a barrier and he cannot tell if he is moving at all -

/it made you strong it was the only thing i could do to fix you you if you weren’t so weak i wouldn’t have had to tear you apart/

“-Sir?”

He comes back. The world around him gleams white and sterile. He is not in the cave. He is Kylo Ren. Snoke has no power over him. He is infinite, he is alpha and omega -

He looks over, and pulls the last few minutes out of the officer’s head. The vision had only gripped him for a moment.

The meaning of this connection is becoming clearer.

Ren feels the salt in his pocket, rubs his fingers over the edges. “This process will render them unsuitable for independent deployment.” He says over the pounding in his ears, over the sound of his own breath.

The officer puffs up. Proud, Ren realizes. “This is true, Sir, and by design.” The noise in Ren’s ears is loud enough that he has to focus to understand. “Stormtroopers are not designed to be deployed outside of an officer giving them orders. This allows us to specialize the conditioning and - “

The officer cuts off. Ren realizes a second later why - the lights in the room are shaking.

“Leave me.”

Ren wakes night after night, gasping from dreams of white on white on white and a voice reverberating, inside his head or out he can’t tell. Night after night he dreams of screaming at the walls for answers and promising an unseen entity that he’ll be better this time and never getting an answer.

The boy is young. He is cared for but he’s still scared, so scared it makes his chest hurt sometimes. Papa asks but the boy doesn’t know how to explain why he’s scared, doesn’t have the words for the things he sees in the dark at night or the whispers he’s not sure are really there.

There are so many things he doesn’t have words for. So many places where his world doesn’t line up with anyone else’s, so many things that don’t make any sense.

He tries to make friends, but the other kids are scared of him or he’s scared of them, he’s not sure which. Everything is loud, and when he tries to talk to them the words don’t come out correctly and no one understands him. People get mad and frustrated and he can’t even get mad _them_ for it, because he’s frustrated with himself too.

He wishes, violently, that he was anyone except who he is, anything except _what_ he is. He wishes he could at least get angry at someone other than himself. He wishes he wasn’t so - pathetic.

Ren opens his eyes, wipes them dry without thought, and pushes from his bed.

That was not a dream. He knows his dreams, knows the acrid aftertaste of them. He has begun to recognize the sterility of Finn’s. No, this was nothing but memory - but a message from the Force, nonetheless.

Snoke’s training made him strong /not strong enough boy never strong enough/. It was necessary to burn away the weakness of Ben Solo and forge the strength of Kylo Ren. Likewise, Anakin Skywalker was burned and forged into Darth Vader.

The stormtrooper program was necessary to turn the raw scrap of FN-2187 into Finn.

Ren watches Reconditioning sessions for a week. After the first, he refuses to let officers in with him. Their emotions - arrogance, satisfaction, sick sadism - are too distracting. They make his hands clench, make his spine shiver and tense like he’s touched a live wire, or the threat of force lightning -

They feel like - like -

Ren focuses on the scene in front of him. This trooper - AX-7391, known as Digger - was starting to break. It’s his fifth day, not that he’s aware of that. His sense of time has slipped enough that he thinks it might be weeks later. He thinks that might be years later, that they’ve forgotten him entirely, that they’ve decommissioned the ship and left him there, abandoned, his entire world this white room with white walls and pre recorded messages. He’s crying, yelling at the walls, promising that he’ll do anything, please, just answer -

-anything, master, I’ll do anything, please just don’t leave me here, just answer me -

-A light in the room above the trooper shatters as Ren pulls himself from the trooper’s mind with a jolt. Ren and the trooper both stare at the shattered light as if it is an answer.

Ren -

-his comm is in his hand, halfway to his mouth already.

“Take him out.” Ren shakes his head, words knocking into each other inside of his mouth. “The trooper, AX-7391. Take him out.”

“Sir - “

“That’s an _order._”

Ren watches as officers go into the room and escort the soldier out.

“Sir, if I may ask…” It’s the officer, whose name Ren has forgotten.

“I was watching the trooper’s mind. He was becoming paranoid, delusional. He’d be no use to the Order in that state,” he justifies.

The officer nods, slowly. “Yes, that is a known risk of the process. AX-7391 had been non compliant to the extent that he would have been decommissioned if this was not effective.”

Decommissioned. Known risk of delusions. Ren bites the inside of his lip but it doesn’t help, he still doesn’t feel it.

“What did he do?”

“He did not respond to initial reconditioning.”

Ren can’t feel his body. The world is at a remove. Everything is still, but, but - it is the stillness of distance, of unreality -

-a known risk of -

“What was the original offense?” His voice comes out from his mouth, but - is it him speaking, he thinks it is, but -

The officer flicks through information on his pad. “Ah. Insubordination.” So little. “And when corrected he persisted in his non conformance.”

He - wants to check but he can’t. He can’t feel enough of the force to -

“However, he will be evaluated and monitored from this point.” Another absent flick. “Shall I send you updates, sir? Reconditioned troopers tend to have a shortened useful lifespan, but,” and the officer smiles, a small sly thing, and Ren wants to rip it off of his face, “We can wring some use out of them this way.” 

He’s waiting - words, or even - Ren nods, and walks out, his hands clenched to keep them from shaking.

Ren walks to his throne room, his steps careful and slow, not touching the ground. He doesn’t feel anything, doesn’t register anything -

This is real. This is real.

/You think I couldn’t do it, child? You think I couldn’t construct something to fool your pathetic senses?/

“I killed you.” Ren breathes out. His fingers twist salt crystals around themselves like Han Solo’s old dice. “I killed you!”

/Did you, did you boy, how would you know-/

His fingers dig into his own arm. Pain is real, pain is something that couldn’t be faked, pain is -

-the voice fades out and reality fades in. Ren swallows, and wipes blood off of his fingernails.

Ren jerks up in his throne as Hux walks in. His salt crystal falters in its twisting pattern in the air.

Hux is furious. His rage is captivating, consuming Ren’s mental vision - Ren shakes his head, refocuses. Hux is angry, but only partially at him.

“A squad defected.” Hux snarls. “One of the troopers was the one present when the trooper escaped capture.”

Hux’s emotions flicker around him, blaming everyone: Ren and Finn and - most surprisingly, himself. Someone should have looked at the stormtrooper, but they’d both been distracted by the officer.

Kylo’s fingers grip the salt crystal.

“He inspires their loyalty.”

Hux stares at him as if the statement was a non sequitur. Maybe for him it was.

“Don’t make an announcement,” Ren decides suddenly. “Don’t inspire others.”

Hux inclines his head. “Indeed. There’s no chance your little investigation has turned up any treason, is there?”

Ren shakes his head. He hadn’t been looking, but he would notice that.

This dream -

-it is the white on white, the echoing silence that he has begun to recognize as Finn’s. It is the feeling of exposure, of every movement giving away the corrosion inside, of waiting for the crack and the crumble -

But it is different, this time - this time, he is aware enough to know that he is aware, aware enough to know that this is someone else’s dream.

He watches, through someone else’s eyes, feels with someone else’s heart; and for one blinding moment he hates, consumed by disgust for someone who feared something as pathetic as _exposure_, who had never faced one who knew every secret and fault line -

and yet and yet, something whispers, Force or memory: images of the young boy who would become Kylo Ren trying so desperately to be normal, trying to hide - the sheer blinding _relief_ when he realized Snoke saw every part of him; fear, yes, and _relief_ -

Knowing that everyone you know would reject you if they knew, he thinks, and the knowing that the rejection has already happened; the privacy of a mind and knowing all safety has been lost.

The terror of walking on the edge of a cliff, and the freedom of falling from it.

The boy who would become Kylo Ren had flung himself from that cliff with Snoke. Finn, too, had jumped with Dameron.

No, Kylo Ren does not hate Finn.

Kylo awakes from what is either sleep or meditation, finding his salt crystal in his hands. He turns it over and over, deep in thought.

“Fn-2999.”

The trooper salutes. His mind is not blank or nervous. It is a barely leashed animal, an engine overclocked. There is a deep snarling wound in his mind, something obsessive and unhealed. Ren wants to press his fingers into the bruise so that he can learn the shape.

Ren barely listens to the words. He’ll look at the recording later. Instead, he narrows his eyes and watches the Force.

The wound in the trooper’s mind is seizing up, spilling black bile of emotion. Ren catches snippets of sentiment -

he left – didn’t he know what that would mean – he didn’t even _ask_ \- he was supposed to be the best of us - 

Ren swallows. Holds up a hand, and the words stop. He looks at the tangle of emotion trembling like a tumor, and tries to understand. There is rage at the betrayal of the order – known and encouraged. There is guilt that the signs were missed. And - there is a very personal, individual anger, multifaceted and tangled – both that he left me and that he left without me.

There is a flash, now familiar, white on white.

The remaining members of Finn’s squad were all subject to Reconditioning after his defection. A precautionary measure, Hux had said. They had all complied completely, model troopers them both, except for their lapse with their squadmate. An ideal example of reconditioning, the officers said.

And this is what remains, Ren thinks. A wound in the soul and ever present ache, fear and guilt turned into rage. A construct built to be used and then discarded, never able to survive on its own. A shortened useful lifespan, the officer had said. Getting use out of something useless.

“You’re dismissed,” Ren manages, and walks out.

When Hux comes in Ren is staring at his crystal, deep in thought. The edges are starting to wear smooth from his fingers.

“How many total?” The question comes out a moment before Hux begins to speak. Hux glowers at him, but doesn’t pretend he’s here for anything but what he is. Ren recognizes the tangle of emotions in the air.

“15.” Hux gestures with a hand and information flows onto the wall - the troopers bio’s. Ren narrows his eyes at it. “We don’t know how they’re organizing -”

“They’re not.” Ren interrupts. Hux stares at him. “This is- this isn’t organized.” Ren leans forward in his seat, salt crystal twisting through his fingers. “They probably didn’t know each other was planning - they’re distributed enough that they wouldn’t be able to meet.” He tilts his head. It is easy to speculate, almost too easy, information dropping into his mind like raindrops. “You have a map of resistance sightings, right?”

The maps don’t completely match up - but a lot of it did. Hux stares at the map. “You think he’s recruiting them?”

Ren nods, except - he thinks, inexplicably, of an offered hand. “Or he leaves the offer open.”

Hux raises his pale eyebrows. Ren waves a hand, trying to explain something that he doesn’t quite have words for.

“Look at the notes for EL squad. Strong squad cohesion. Finn probably offered when he first met, and they only took him up on the offer when the entire squad was there.”

Hux narrows his eyes, and Ren only realizes a moment later that he said “Finn”, not “the traitor”. Ren doesn’t correct himself. Finn has earned his name.

“Or she stayed behind to convince others to -what.”

Ren is shaking his head. “If she talked to others we would have heard about it. That kind of rumor would spread, and there’s been nothing.”

“You really think a dozen stormtroopers came to the conclusion that they should defect independently.”

“Why not?” Something about all of this is clawing at him, something that he can’t look at, something that feels like a whisper in the Force and he doesn’t know if it’s him or - “Finn did, and Snoke publicized it. They know it’s possible to do it and live.”

Hux stares at the maps and bios up on the wall, his hands folded behind his back.

“We’ll have to kill them. Make it public.”

“No.” Ren cuts in, almost desperate. He can’t - Hux’s laser glare settles on him and he swallows. Ren scrambles for an excuse he can use. “They’ll become martyrs, reasons to keep fighting, reasons to never be caught.” Hux doesn’t respond. “Look, I grew up in a Rebellion, I know how they work.”

Hux lets out a breath. “But if we keep the deaths secret, they’ll become ghosts we can’t eliminate.”

Hux is looking to him to provide an answer. Hux is looking for orders, and the pressure makes Ren’s chest ache.

/so unsuitable for command/

Ren has nothing to say, nothing he can say yet. “Let’s capture them first.”

There is a voice echoing through his bones, his entire being twanging like the string in an old instrument -

Late in a night cycle, Ren jolts up from his bed in his room and stares down at melted candles and sloppily drawn lines of salt.

He has searched through the mind of every stormtrooper on the ship, rooted through the brains of officers and staff alike.

He has found nothing - no flicker of the Force strong enough, no evidence. No /source/ for the sourceless voice.

His hands shake, around his salt crystal.

There is only one possibility left.

it was possible, it had always been possible, he was a fool for not considering it before -

The sith had their holocrons, a way to maintain their spirits after death and communicate with the living - in his studies Ren had spoken to many of them, coaxed the knowledge of the dark from them, learned the secrets of their immortality -

-but Snoke needed no holocron, Snoke had hidden himself away in something much more powerful than a hunk of stone and metal, Snoke had -

/i fill the empty broken parts of you, boy, your cracks and flaws, you are nothing without me inside of you, you are nothing you are nothing/

There are rituals for purification of the body and mind, draughts drunk to expel the unwanted and sigils to prevent spiritual infection. Kylo Ren digs through them all, and ruins a dozen priceless records in frustration. Nothing fits, nothing would work, taunting him with extinct ingredients and near-miss qualifications.

Holocrons were destroyed when their influence was no longer desired. But to remove the spirit but leave the container unharmed -

/you are nothing but a-/

Ren grits his teeth, clenches his fist. He is not, he is more, he is.

Snoke built a space for himself in his mind - even that thought, even that makes the world around him swirl alarmingly and his hands shake - Snoke built a place, over years and years, entrenched in a way that a simple empathic resonance or opportunistic ghost wouldn’t be.

The past will not hold his answers. He should known that. He was a fool to forget.

He makes his own ritual.

Salt, he decides, salt and fire. All of Snoke’s effects have been destroyed already, but Ren will need no focus except for himself.

He tells Hux not to interrupt and answers no questions.

Twenty nine hours awake, twenty nine hours fasting. He is thirsty, but does not drink. He traces careful patterns on the floor of his rooms, salt lines swirling out from a central point and candles at each junction.

He kneels in the center of the pattern, with salt coating his skin and his tongue and the floor around him. He breathes in, once. Larger crystals of salt float around him, replicating the pattern on the floor.

His vision blurs. His throat aches. The crystals swirl. He takes a breath, and lets it out. 

The candles on the floor burst into flame. From them the lines of salt catch - the orange flames fill his vision and then race up his skin, too fast to burn, singing the inside of his mouth and -

-he inhales fire.

He wakes, an infinite amount of time later. His skin is not burnt. His mouth hurts, but it will heal. He smells smoke. Hux will be annoyed, and that almost amuses him.

He hears - nothing.

He breathes in again, and smiles.

  
  


He does not seek out the connection. He knows he will not need to. He lets himself drift into a peaceful sleep and does not expect to dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content notes: torture, dehumanization, panic attacks, magical thinking, kylo sets himself on fire (on purpose), mild sexual content and dysfunction, kylo's view of his own sexuality is not that of the author's


	6. Chapter 6

Again, the fog. Again, the sense of the other, the echo reflecting infinitely through a distance that does not exist. There is a swell of life, of awareness, the entire galaxy swirling around – and then silence, a moment of stillness – and then again, and again, the connection and the spaces between, a rhythm as vital as a breath.

The man turns towards and steps with intention, searching and finding.

There is no anger between them, not right now, and barely any surprise. There is something almost like relief, though neither would name it such, and a knowledge of the echo between them, the same noise reverberating through them both. They stand, not mirrors, not light and dark, but reflections nonetheless.

“Ren.”

“Finn.”

It’s strange to hear that name, his name, from someone in a First Order uniform. Finn doesn’t know what it is, except for that – strange, like it should feel more significant than it does.

If it were any other officer, he thinks, maybe it would be different. Jarring like a suddenly broken fall. Phasma would never say his name like that, like a statement of fact.

But Ren isn’t any other officer, and this acknowledgement feels natural.

“The Force has brought us together.” Ren says. Finn nods in agreement, his throat tight. He doesn’t know why the Force would do that. A threat or warning, he thinks, as if DJ wasn’t enough - this is the consequence of selfishness. But if General Organa couldn’t or wouldn’t fix him and make him need less, then what was he supposed to do?

“I’ve looked into the Stormtrooper program.” Finn stares at Ren. His expression is - earnest, Finn thinks, though he isn’t sure. “I felt your dreams. The white on white, and the silence.” A pause. Ren’s expression shifts, again, eyes half closed and eyebrows shifting. “You have… suffered much.”

Something shudders down Finn's spine, an emotion he doesn't have a name for filling his chest.

He suffered. What he went through - was suffering. It wasn't that he was too weak, not fit for anything. He suffered, he was hurt, and -

He shouldn't be finding this validation here with Ren, the enemy who had done so much harm. But maybe this is the only place he could find it, the only way he would ever accept it.

He swallows.

Maybe the Force doesn't mean this as a warning after all.

“I - recognized it, as I watched.” Ren pauses, bites the inside of his lip. “Snoke trained me in much the same way.” Finn nods, and Kylo doesn’t understand his expression, but it doesn’t matter, it doesn't. “I know how hard it is. To - have your whole self pulled apart so something new can grow in its place.”

An expression that Ren cannot read passes over Finn’s face. “…The cave,” he mutters, and Ren nods. It is not a surprise that Finn felt his memories and nightmares in return. There is no insight gained without sacrifice - to gaze into the abyss is to let the abyss gaze into you.

And yet, it settles oddly in his mind, being seen in this way - this resonance, this echo - the holy rituals used to peel back the physical self and tap into a knowledge of the deepest darkness finding a mirror in the sterile secular world. Divine secrets turning out to not be secrets at all, his unique training shared by countless others.

With Rey, he thought he could find someone with whom he could be alone together, a shared isolation. With Finn, he thinks, it will be different - a shared language of experiences, knowing and being known, not isolation at all. Ren has never experienced that, but he wants it, maybe more than he’s wanted anything before.

Finn looks at him and sees him and does not flinch away.

“I killed Snoke. I had become strong under his training and so I killed him.” Ren says, still so intense. His eyes flick to the fog around them but then focus on Finn again. “You, too, struggled against your shackles until you became strong enough to shatter them. Phasma is dead.” Ren steps closer, what is he - Ren holds out a hand. “I took Snoke’s place. You can take hers.”

Finn stares at him. Looks at him, and then down at his hand, trying to process -

"What - No!" Finn steps back, because that - "I don't -"

"You can do it. Take control of the program, run it the way you want, end the war.” Ren says, still reaching out. He sounds like he’s trying to be gentle, Finn thinks hysterically. "What you have suffered has made you strong. You killed her, so take your spoils. Take what you are owed.”

"I’m not strong!” The words burst out of his mouth like blasterfire, the only part he can respond to at first. “I’m not strong, I’m just scared! That’s what it made me. Scared, and weak, and - obedient. It broke me and I’m not going to do it to anyone else. I’m - not gonna be that person.”

Ren is staring. Ren is staring, wide eyed, his hand dropping like a deactivated droid. It isn’t even the rage Rey told him of from her refusal, but flat disbelief.

“It’s what you were meant to be.”

“I don’t care!” Finn’s not even angry, that’s the thing, he’s just – “I’m going to be what I want to be, not what someone else made me.”

And he wants it. Finn realizes it like a bolt of lightning, like a lightsaber flaring to life in his hands - he wants to be something else, wants to be something other than the loyal soldier, Phasma’s heir or Rebellion martyr, something other than just /useful/ to a cause. He wants to be - something else. He doesn’t know what or how -

-but that didn’t stop him when he fled the Finalizer with Poe, either, grabbing onto any chance to be free. Take the leap and figure out how to fly on the way down. He’s still falling, but he hasn’t crashed yet, so maybe it’s still possible. He has people who can help him, who want the best for him.

Finn thinks of Snoke, then, of a reconditioning officer on the inside of his head. Nowhere to hide, nowhere he can be safe. The cave.

He swallows, and takes a step forward.

“Snoke is gone. Phasma is gone too. We don’t -” Finn stalls, his hand twitching in an aborted movement, and then - “We’re free to be whoever we want to be, right? I don’t want to take her place, and you don’t have to take his. We don’t have to be who they made us anymore.”

Ren opens his mouth. He should say something, anything, to convince Finn to come with him – promises of power and authority, forgiveness for the other rebels, something. But the only thing he can think is this loop of ‘it made me weak I don’t want to be i don’t want to be what I was made to be’–

-snoke is gone, he said snoke is -

The fog around them snarls and whips as if caught in a sudden wind - visions snap past: clockwork breaking apart and rusting; poison sinking into well water and plants rotting. 

The man opens his mouth to shout for the other but the fog rushes in, filling his lungs like saltwater -


	7. Chapter 7

Ren wakes and rages.

The salt lines around his bed burst into flame, yellow orange leaping up his bed. His pulls on his hair, screaming, flames licking at his skin.

How dare that - how stupid was he - he’d been so sure -

-’We don’t have to be-’

The ship’s fire suppression system kicks on, drenching everything in soft foam, and Kylo Ren is still screaming. He is screaming, he is - he is sobbing, furious breaths taken like a man drowning -

Ren pushes up from what remains of his bed. He steps over the char and melted salt, barely aware of the rough surface under his feet. The fire suppression is starting to burn his skin. He - he should. Shower.

He wants to rip the ship apart. He wants to rip himself apart, let the chemicals eat away his skin, lay down and never get up again.

He steps into the shower and uses a water ration stripping chemicals from his skin. Then he uses up another, sitting on the floor of the shower and trying to breathe.

Finn didn’t call him Ben.

It - it would have been easier if he’d - it would make /sense/ if he’d - if Finn had been trying to bring Ben back, if he’d been like Rey and trying to reach someone who had never existed.

But Finn had looked him in the eye, in a place where all things were revealed, and said no.

Why did he say no?

/You’ll always be alone, I was the only one who wanted you, you’ll never-/

“Shut /up/,” Ren sobs, swallowing stale water.

Eventually the water shuts off, even the Supreme Leader’s water ration running dry.

He stays slumped on the bottom of the shower for a long time.

Why? Why not - take the position, let his friends live, run the program -

“I won’t do to others -”

Finn thinks it made him weak. Finn - Finn does not think himself tempered but sapped, that what was done to him, what was done to both of them -

-not designed to be deployed independently, decreased useful lifespan, never meant to survive -

/you were never meant to outlive me -/

“I am stronger than them,” Ren breathes out, “I am stronger, I am unbroken, I am unbreakable,”

/I trained you like a tree, purned and twisted, useless without me, not strong enough to stand on your own-/

“I killed you.”

/And you still hear me because you need me, you don’t know how to live without me, you need me, even now you -/

A meeting alert on his datapad. Ren imagines that maybe Hux will come and check on him, sneer at him that he’s useless for missing the meeting, but check on him just the same.

No one comes.

Ren dreams, disconnected images of machinery being rebuilt, the sense of steering a ship with stiff controls. Mixed in is the now familiar white-on-white-on-white and the glaring isolation of reconditioning -

Ren wakes and curls in on himself with a snarl.

Finn turned him down, denied him and refused him. There is no reason for such a connection to remain, no reason for the dreams to continue. There was never any connection, just an illusion -

/So desperate you’ll cling to anyone, won’t you, won’t you/

Ren stares up at the ceiling. His mind is a wrecked ship. He hears droids whirring around his room, wiping up debris without disturbing the lines of salt surrounding him.

It is possible that- it is -

Snoke always hid himself, made himself almost indistinguishable from Ben’s own thoughts. Made it sound like the kinds of things he would think anyway, like natural outgrowths.

Almost indistinguishable. Almost? Maybe he hadn’t been – no, he was, he was.

Ren digs his fingers into the meat of his other arm. The pain is removed, present but separate. It does not help, does not give him power or certainty. He digs in harder.

Snoke is real. Wa - is. Is. It is - possible that he - if there was no ward or purification that could defy him, and no search that could reveal him -

Ren’s blood drips down his arm and down his throat –

-

Hux looks up as Ren enters his office for the first time in a week. He looks exhausted, almost as exhausted as Ren feels. Hux doesn’t manage to get to through a salute before Ren is talking.

“Phasma is dead, right?”

Hux stares like he can’t understand for a long moment, or like he can’t believe what Ren just asked.

“...Sir, I saw to the body myself. Why?”

Ren - pauses. It could be useful to revive Phasma, if the troopers are afraid of her still. Sow discord and confusion and help quell the rebellion. Put on the armor and no one would know the difference.

Ren walks away instead. In his throne room, he tries to justify it, words of strategy and arguments, but all he can hear is endless laughter and the breath of a ghost.

Ren lays in his bed. He’s awoken half hard from a dream he doesn’t remember.

There was kissing in it, he thinks. Long slow kisses, and gentle hands holding him down. The thought makes something in his chest ache, a weight between his ribs pressing against his lungs.

He is the Supreme Leader of the Order, the closest thing the galaxy has to an Emperor. He should want for nothing. If he wanted, he could have partners of every gender and species prepared for him. He could even get people indulge those weakest needs, stern men and women who would touch him harshly and talk to him indulgently.

But he can’t get someone who looks at him and sees him, who wants him and not what they can use him for.

That’s what he wants, and in the dead of the night he can admit it - he wants to show all of himself and look at the other and know they are showing all of themselves too. It wouldn’t even have to be sex, he thinks miserably, just –

Someone who looked at him like he was their entire world, someone focusing all of their attention on him, who – made him feel the way he used to, he realizes, nausea pooling in the bottom of his stomach, someone to give him praise and attention and control

But Rey and Finn turned him down, and Hux would never give him the chance.

-

Ren wanders the ship, his footsteps echoing endlessly through the halls. He ends up near the stormtrooper training areas and almost absently sweeps his mind out, glancing at their minds.

Every one of them feels Phasma over their shoulder, every one of them expects her at any moment, every one convinced that she can't be dead, because someone like her doesn't just die. Her ghost lingers in them even though she is gone. She should have no power, and yet, and yet.

The tiles beneath his feet rattle and shake, but he ignores it and keeps walking, sure he should be feeling something but unable to tell what.

It was necessary, it was all necessary, just as it had been necessary to turn Anakin into Vader, burn away the weakness and -

-and his limbs, Ren thinks numbly, and his ability to breathe unaided, and fight with any grace, and -

-Vader's prosethics were fragile, needed near constant maintanence, even though he could have gotten better ones, even though Palpatine could have -

It was necessary, it had been necessary -

/a tool never meant to outlive its master/

The two leaders stand in front of him at attention. Headshot, her armor shining and posture perfect; Officer Tarkin smug and expectant. They stand on the other side of a line of salt surrounding the throne.

  
Ren isn’t sure why he’s here. The two leaders of the Stormtrooper program have come to some disagreement they can’t resolve between themselves. A stalemate, such as Hux and Ren often came to in their shared command of the Finalizer.

  
Snoke always justified it with lines about the value of conflict, that a worthy student of the dark would bend any to his will. But Hux would prove unbendable, and it had fascinated and enraged Ren in turns.

  
But listening to reports about stormtrooper defections, it all seems… counterproductive. Festering ill feeling and pettiness – a splitting of power, not a consolidation. Snoke told him it was necessary.

/it was necessary it was all necessary/

  
Snoke was setting them up to fail. Distracting him so that he wouldn’t see his true enemy.

  
His hand clenches.

“….And that is the situation, Supreme Leader.” Tarkin finishes. Ren narrows his eyes and pulls the details of the report out of people’s minds.

  
The problem: stormtroopers are defecting at a rate they can no longer conceal.

  
The proposed solutions: Tarkin wants an aggressive program of reconditioning, lowering the requirements for admittance and increasing surveillance in trooper areas. The other officers agree, in their heads and out loud, calling for a firm hand and consequences.

  
Headshot proposes a massive restructuring of the program, beginning with reconditioning. Until the program has been revamped, all reconditioning should cease. The assembled officers consider this foolish at best and treasonous at worst.

  
“Headshot.” She salutes. Ren isn’t sure how long he spent thinking. It doesn’t matter. “You are proposing a major change in policy.” She nods. “Why reconditioning?”

A ripple of surprise spreads through the officer. The officers look to him to correct her, he realizes now. Not to decide on the best course, but to put an uppity trooper in her place, make her bend the way Phasma never would.

  
“I looked at patterns, sir. Reconditioning leads to a decrease in useful lifespan in almost all cases.” Ren’s fingers twitch. “This is known. However, I also discovered that the multiple rounds of reconditioning increase the risk of defection, rather than decrease it.” Someone scoffs. Another hums at their copy of the report. “In several cases, defection only occurred after a trooper was ordered to report to reconditioning. In those cases, the trooper did not show previous risk for defection and those instances were noticeably higher risk.” She pauses. “FN-2187 was one of these cases.”

  
“From this, I have concluded that reconditioning does not achieve its aims of reinforcing loyalty of troopers, and instead increases the risk of defection. Therefore it must be reconstructed at the very least.”

  
All the times Ren would have run back to being Ben if he thought there was anywhere he could have hid.

  
/cowards unable to face punishment/

  
Ren doesn’t have a decision, not one he would dare speak. He manages to dismiss everyone except Hux. Hux is the only mind he can stand right now.

  
Silence. Ren stares down at the report and tries to make his thoughts line up.

  
“Tarkin is well connected.” Hux says into the silence. “And he has the support of the officers. Siding against him would cause ill feeling.”

  
Ren tries to shoot him a glare. It comes out weak. “I will make my decision on what is best for the Order, not on petty politics.”

  
“Even so.” A beat. “And your decision?”

Ren closes his eyes but all he can hear is the pounding of his own pulse. He must make a choice, but every choice feels too much, too revealing, and he cannot explain why - Finn's words echo on the inside of his head endlessly -

/it was necessary it was necessary it had to be necessary/

“Tarkin’s.” Ren says. He feels something flicker in the Force but cannot tell what it is, cannot tell anything through the noise and the silence. “A position of strength is required.”

/strength strength you can never falter you can never soften/

But if Snoke – or even – agreed then -

He feels Hux nod and leave, his own eyes still closed.

It doesn't feel right. Nothing feels right.

It doesn't matter.

Ren lays back in his chair and listens to the voices in his head, a cacophony of arguments.

/it is necessary it is necessary/

It will make them stronger, make them all stronger. Their weaknesses will be purged from them like purified metal -

/if it wasn’t necessary then -/

If it wasn’t necessary then what did that make him –

Ren dreams of tempered metal being hit and – shattering -  
  


He trains, pushing his body until his limbs shake and his steps falter. For the first time in his life, physical exertion does not bring calm, does not expend the energy bouncing on the inside of his head like wild animals. It does not silence the thoughts, does not overpower the voices, and he does not know what else to do.

Stormtrooper defections are still rising. Killed in action numbers are rising to match. Officer Tarkin continues to call for increased punishments, more intensive observation. Headshot has no contribution.

Hux looks tired. This information filters in almost absently, but - Hux looks tired.

Ren's mind echoes over and over with numbers and snippets of reports and Finn's words, possibilities and the emptiness, has it always been this empty -

If -

-If Snoke has been -

-If, this whole time, then, then - then -

Hux is speaking. Hux has been speaking and Ren doesn’t bother trying to follow because it doesn’t matter, nothing matters, if this was - if the whole time Snoke had been -

He’s aware of Hux leaving, a stack of datapads and flimsi on the table. Ren doesn’t move, his salt crystal spinning uselessly in the air above him.

Officer Tarkin has a proposal and presents it at the next meeting.

"Chips implanted into their bodies would be able to track them no matter where they run to. Possibly into the brain, though that would be more intensive... There is some research in being able to tell what someone is thinking by the electrical signals, which would be quite valuable." A pause. "I don't know why this isn't standard already, truly."

"Considered an unnecessary expense at the time." One of the older officers adds, casual.

Ren swallows but he can't speak. He can't breathe, his throat is closing up, he can't -

"Hmph. Nevertheless, we could still implant recording devices."

The older officer, a veteran of old wars, hums. "The clone army had chips implanted in their brains at birth, so that neurological development was shaped by the directives -"

If chips could do it, warping the brain that way, if these mundane fools could do it with technology –

/insignificant next to the power of the Force/

Something in the room breaks. Ren doesn't know what. Maybe it's him, maybe his own throat is imploding, collapsing like a star -

"-Sir?"

"Get out." No one moves, and then Ren does, up on his feet and hands against a shattered desk - "OUT."

The room empties.

Ren slides to the floor, blood smearing from his hands. He can't breathe, except he's breathing too much, he can't -

-"I won't do to others-"

The walls of the room are concaving. Are they? His vision is going black, he –

-he doesn’t remember when Snoke began speaking to him, he doesn’t remember a time before, he – the Force could do all things, guiding the development of a young mind, shaping the neurological system and–

/I made you boy I always said so, there is no part of you that was not built by me/

/you seek a way to escape my grip but there is no where you go where I have not been/

\- he digs into the cuts on his hands and sits and bleeds.

-if it wasn’t necessary then he was not tempered but broken, if it wasn’t necessary then it was meaningless, if it was not necessary then he is not alpha and omega and the deepest darkness and the way into the night, if it was not necessary then –

/you are just a broken doll lying on the floor, still a scared little boy hiding behind a robe and a lie and so desperate for an excuse to be afraid that you’ll even -/

Ren gets an alert on his ‘pad from Headshot.

"Update: AX-7391 Aka Digger, KIA in Felucia."

Ren has to think for a moment to figure out why he's being informed of the death of a single trooper. Then - oh, oh, white on white on white, a broken light, sigil or choice.

He swallows and reads the killed in action report.

"Soldier displayed reckless and irrational behavior: reacting to things that were not there, at one point firing his blaster at empty air in response to a perceived threat; unable to recall members of squad; self terminated via blaster at 1723 Order Standard Time."

The datapad cracks, veins spreading through the screen like spiderwebs, like electrocution burns - Ren feels nothing, or he feels everything, the eye of the storm, things moving frantically around him -

-is this necessary is this necessary IS THIS WORTH IT -

The datapad crumbles into shards of metal, sharp and vicious under his fingertips. 

The defections are still rising. Ren cannot bring himself to be angry, though he should /they are mocking your power destroy them destroy them all /

If Finn - if breaking free were an act of truth, if that was what he himself did again and again, if they were throwing off their chains as he had, then did he have any right to -

“I won’t do to someone else -”

/Tools obey their masters/

If they defied their design and chose their own future - throwing their pasts away and choosing their own futures - proving their worth to freedom by the claiming of it -

“-eme leader. Ren!”

Ren jerks in his seat. Hux’s mug of tea shatters, bitter taurine tea splashing on the desk amid a corona of plasteel shards.

Hux looks down at the shards, and then back up at Ren. His expression is cold and his fury is hot.

“I suppose that answers the question of whether or not you were listening to me,” he snaps.

Ren doesn’t know how long he lost. He doesn’t dare check in Hux’s mind.

Hux’s perfect veneer is cracking. He throws a stack of flimsi down on the desk. “Do you have any idea how furious the old guard is over this? How much this weakens our position?”

Ren surges up out of his chair. The flimsi scatter under a sudden wind -

“Supreme Leader.” Hux snarls, his hands in tight fists. He makes the word sound like a curse. “Do you even have a plan for dealing with the troopers? Any ‘will of the Force’ that might be useful in this situation?”

Ren opens his mouth but he has nothing to say, of course he doesn’t, he’s spend ages trying to come up with a response and he still can’t decide -

/useless useless useless/

“Why should I have to fixed the problems in your flawed system?”

Not flawed though because if it was then what Snoke did to him was flawed and–

Hux makes a wordless sound of rage. He’s incandescent in the Force, almost beautiful in his rage.

“Because it’s your system too, you blundering idiot! Did you spend months inspecting the corps for _fun_? You killed your master so you could have this job, at the very least you can _do_ it!”

That wasn’t – he didn’t – Ren snarls and he can’t explain - shouldn’t have to, shouldn’t -

His arm comes up, his fingers twitching and the Force bursting out of his fingers -

-And Hux flinches. Swallows, as if proving to himself he still can.

Ren’s arm falls.

“My apologies, Supreme Leader.” Hux says, but he’s gone blank blank blank in the Force, like he’s not there – he’s looking at Ren, through Ren, not seeing him and - “That was-”

“Stop.” Hux’s mouth clicks shut. Ren – the fleeting impression of – someone, someone else with red hair, leaning over, a fist tangled in a shirt collar, a complicated mess of emotions he almost recognizes – Ren -

/useless take what you are owed make him beg/

No. Snoke is a liar. Snoke is a liar and should not be listened to, his goals are not Ren’s -

-but what else? Ren doesn’t know what else to do, how else to respond, what else to -

“...go.”

Hux flees. Ren slides to the floor, and clutches his salt crystal until cracks start to form.

No. Snoke could never move his hands, couldn’t control his body, just his thoughts and Ren had cast him out /can never escape me/ 

-but then, but if not, if Snoke hadn’t -

-the rage had flooded his mind and body, instinct and emotion flaring, every thought tuned to How Dare He -

-he chose, he chose, no one moved his hand but him, he has chosen -

“I don’t want to do to others-”

The desk cracks and plasteel shards float and that’s - that’s him too, there’s nothing but his emotions, there’s - he’s –

Brendol Hux. One of the Imperial Officers that founded the Order. Commandant of the Imperial Academy and architect of the modern Stormtrooper program. The original contact with Snoke.

Ren scans over the details in the file and lets the Force fill in what the file is missing – the children beaten or killed, the manipulation, cowardice in front of those stronger and abuse of those weaker, the bruises on his young son.

Hux looks at Ren and sees his father, now.

Something in the room cracks, a light above him exploding in a shower of sparks.

/you are what I have made you to be a rabid hound snapping at any who get close I made you I made you and you cannot be anything else you are what I want you to be/

It’s an official report, the state of the Order. High Command stands at attention around the throne, a semi circle on the other side of a salt circle boundary.

so blank. He still won’t meet Ren’s eyes, staring over Ren’s shoulder, perfectly polite and professional, and Ren wants to shout at him, force him to -

-Hux is looking at him like he’s Snoke. Like Snoke, or like the flickers of Brendol Hux, like –

/what you were made to be/ 

-Ren can’t breathe, but it isn’t the Force, it is not Snoke and it is not the Force -

-the Force /twangs/ and Ren holds a hand. Hux stops immediately, swallowing, but Ren isn’t looking at him, that wasn’t from him -

Ren scans over the officers, eyes half shut as he looks with other senses - confusion, fear, curiosity about the salt, boredom, fear, fear, fear -

-hatred.

Ren stops there, stepping down from his throne, staring down at the officer from across the salt line. Older, Imperial trained, arrogant and resentful. But the rage is sharper, focused -

“You. What are you hiding?”

“What- I’m not hiding anything, you paranoid child!” Muttering around the room, anger at him or at the officer, he’s not sure - Ren doesn’t care, he is in the Force, he is separated and he is above - Ren sees Hux shift but doesn’t respond. The officer does, though, snarling at Hux - “And you! Indulging him like this! What would your father think of it?”

The air crackles. “Don’t you dare insult my Grand Marshal.” How dare this man make Hux flinch, how dare - “You /are/ hiding something.” Ren narrows his eyes, ready to dig in -

The officer glances back and forth in panic - and before Ren can pull through more than even the surface levels of his mind, the officer pulls out a blaster.

Ren freezes his muscles before he completes the motion. The officer is left a statue, eyes flicking back and forth, breath shallowing.

“You just attempted to draw a weapon on the Supreme Leader. I hope that was worth whatever you wanted to hide from me.”

Ren tears through the man's mind, memories peeling away like scraps of paper, like the ashes of a fire - the officer fancies himself trained, strong of mind and of will -

-so much more worthy than these upstart children, what have they given up for glory, what have they earned -

Old glories flicker past Ren's mind, the impression of medals. Ren distantly feels his lip curl into a snarl.

There - quick as a fish, a thought, the shape of a plan - Ren grabs it with a flick of his wrist.

He returns to his body. He is breathing harshly. There is blood inside of his mouth. His mind thrums with power, with the fear of the people around him, the sensation of the man slowly suffocating -

He releases the hold on the man's breath, but cracks his wrist before the man can go for his blaster.

"Take him to the brig," Ren says. His voice feels hollow, distant, a vocoder in his mouth, not his own. "It appears we have traitors among us."

There are guards and shuffles and soon the room empties except for Hux. Ren frowns down at the ruined lines of salt around his throne. Absent mindedly he pushes them back into arrangement with the Force.

"I will look into the situation." Hux. Hux remains, and Ren focuses on him. "Though if it's who I suspect, it will prove politically complex."

Hux still isn't looking at him, and -

Ren is free of all control now. He is his own man, not bound by the legacy of any who came before. The past will die and Ren will kill it again and again, stepping out into the abyss where there is no pathway.

He will find his own road by the gaps where no one has gone before.

"Hux."

"Sir?"

Ren swallows. He is standing at the edge of the salt lines, and cannot bring himself to step over. He is standing at a cliff's edge –

For once, the shape of Hux's thoughts is clear - a tumble of exhaustion and frustration and '/my/ grand martial?' – a phantom bruise, the ghosts of fingers around his neck -

"You are valuable to the Order." Hux does not react. Ren huffs, looking away, wanting to pace. "Our last meeting, I -" Hux stiffens, just enough that Ren can notice, and - "I will not harm you again."

/such promises you make/

Hux stares at him, but at least he's looking at him now, and that is enough, that's -

Hux's mind tumbles, too quickly for Ren to read, calculations and probabilities flashing like the lines of stars.

Hux nods, once, stiff. It's as close to forgiveness as Ren is going to get.

Silence for a moment. Ren is unwilling to dismiss him, but in truth he has no reason to linger.

Hux glances at the ring of salt around the throne. “Why salt?” Hux finally asks.

Trust Hux to have no knowledge of these things. “Traditional. Wards away spirits, creates a boundary. Purification. Salt, and fire.”

/But it’s not an outside influence it’s me he’s in me he’s me it’s just me I’ll have to tear myself apart atom by atom to rip him out/

“Hmm.” Hux gathers himself to leave, dusting off any emotions along with the remnants of the attempted assassination. “I’m used to it being used to ruin crops.”

Ren is invited to observe the new reconditioning procedures.

He does not go, but can feel the terror and agony wherever he goes.

Ren listens to Headshot reporting on Stormtrooper defection. He cannot be angry at them for deserting. He - it is an odd sensation, this lack of anger, and yet. They are defining their own lives, claiming the very right he killed a dozen times over for. He killed kin and masters to throw off his chains, and here he sits, reading a report on how to forge thicker chains.

/It is necessary/

Was it, was it, was it worth it –

He does not know which voices belong to who. He does not know which are echoing inside his head and which outside it. He is caught in a whirlwind, battered this way and that, and does not fight it.

There’s something - Headshot looks at him but she is blank blank blank blank in the way Hux is sometimes, and maybe Ren should find out what she’s hiding, dig in and pry -

-except maybe it’s nothing, maybe there’s nothing to be found, maybe he’s just imagining it like he’s imagining -

/foolish boy leaning on your own understanding/

He dismisses Headshot without prying into her mind. He could destroy her looking for something he is not sure exists /always chasing ghosts you should have known after luke/ and - Hux would find out, Hux would know he’s chasing shadows, Hux would think he’s useless-

There must be a solution, there must be a - step forward, a way to wipe the slate clean, remove any trace of the past /who are you without me, who are you, if you aren’t Ben or Kylo or - who are you without me/

-He doesn’t know, he doesn't know, he doesn’t exist outside of Snoke, he -

But he survived. If Snoke has been gone this whole time, then he killed Snoke and still lives -

Crumbling and crack, a sinking ship, a broken foundation

-Snoke is dead and holds no power, he has no power -

/And you’re still like this, you’re still missing it so much, you need it so much, you’re still-/

-still like this, why is he still -

There is a report floating in the air in front of him. Ren stares at it, information smeared onto the surface of his eyes.

Hux gives Ren enough time to look over the report. Ren doesn’t read it, barely able to perceive it as words. Ren isn’t sure if Hux can tell, if he can divine it from Ren’s drifting eyes and slumped shoulders.

/every part of you on display, you wrap yourself in shadow and other people’s skin but you're just a -/

Hux clears his throat.

“As you can see, sir.” Hux gestures to the report. “We have identified the major players in the faction aiming to take control of the….” Hux is still stiff, slightly out of reach, eyes tightening every time Ren’s fingers shift. He’s still - even now -

/did you think you could fix anything, wild beast fit only for destruction, only muzzled or put down-/ 

“...it is a small faction, but influential.” Hux’s voice filters back into Ren’s mind. “I had suspected some of them of planning something, but lacked evidence to pursue things more thoroughly until one of them tried to pull his blaster on you.” Hux’s lips twist. “I’d like to a proper rout, of course, but it would be difficult to eliminate all of them.”

Ren, after a moment, tilts his head. Hux gestures to the report again. “For now, the older Imperials are tentatively supportive of us. But we have been pushing their tolerances, and too aggressive a campaign against those they see as their own could alienate them entirely.” Ren opens his mouth to object, to lie and say the past meant nothing - “At best, we lose their material support, leaving us scrambling and starving for resources. You’ll see the estimated costs here, including death,” his stylus indicates a point on the report. “The worst case, of course, would be full out civil war.” Hux smiles tightly.

“It is possible they would be able to gather enough forces to destabilize the order.” His expression snarls up. “Officer Tarkin is well connected, which is why his appointment appeased them for a time. But if his family goes their own way, it is highly probable that he would follow and take an unknown amount of the stormtrooper corps with him.

“At that that point, recovery would be… difficult. The details are here.” He taps another spot on the report. “While mishandling will not necessarily lead to the collapse of the Order…”

Everything Snoke tried to build, burning to ash and rubbish, a complete a ruination as possible -

“Sir?”

“We could.” Ren stares through the report, through the walls and into the infinity of space, his eyes unfocused and his body dissolving, reality slipping away. “Let it burn.”

Ren comes back to himself, his awareness slipping back and his eyes focusing on the man across the desk from him.

Hux is staring at him and he looks more betrayed than when Ren choked him.

Ren’s mouth is dry, his lips are numb, and - he shouldn’t have, Hux will surely kill him and - what? What does it matter? It would be - Ren swallows. He doesn’t know what to say now. Hux isn’t going for his blaster, why isn’t Hux -

“And you’d do what?” Hux snarls. “Run back to your Resistance scum family -”

“_No_.” No, never, he would - “I would rather die.”

The words drop flatly into silence, ringing with truth.

Maybe that has always been the truth. Perhaps that’s it, this is his destiny, this has always been his destiny: to destroy himself and the galaxy, to be that final entropy, destruction of self and of all in a single act - he thinks of Starkiller, or a supernova, destroying and being destroyed-

The thought is arresting. The thought is euphoric, the satisfaction of the Force and the power of his saber in his hands, sparks flying and power eating him alive with every use - it feels right, relief singing in his bones-

-Hux opens his mouth and closes it, swallows, and opens it again.

“If you would like to die in a grand explosion,” Hux says, his voice distant and flat, ripping all of Ren’s thoughts off their track, “I can arrange that for you in a way that won’t result in the Order disintegrating.”

Hux means it. Hux would do it without hesitation, might even relish the opportunity. Ren thinks of it: the slow death by poison while Hux watches; the blade sliding into his ribs with the gentleness of a kiss; wrapping his lips around Hux’s blaster, taking it deep into his throat, his tongue against Hux’s bare finger on the trigger -

Ren swallows.

“Well?” Hux’s expression is blank. “Is that your goal, Supreme Leader?” Ren says nothing, has nothing to say, there is nothing he can - “What do you even /want/, Ren?”

Ren’s mouth moves and his voice comes out, and there is no one moving him but himself, there is no one here but -

“I don’t know.”

The door slides shut as Hux stalks off, eaving Ren alone in the echoing silence. 

Ren isn’t sure how he ends up in his rooms. He isn’t sure if he’s seen, stumbling and eyes glassy, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

Ash and salt scatter under his footsteps. He ends up in the ‘fresher, staring in the mirror, looking for someone else’s face, looking for the afterimage of Snoke in the reflection, for anything -

The mirror cracks. 

He was not built to outlive Snoke. He was designed to be used, to be dependent and needy. He was broken into shape to be an extension of Snoke’s will and he does not know how to be anything else. 

The salt crystal crumbles in his hand. Useless. 

No wonder the salt didn’t work, no wonder, no wonder -

Finn manages it. Finn is a person, has needs and wants beyond what he is told to have. There is something inside of him that is him and wasn't put there by anyone else. 

Maybe this isn't a surprise. Ren always knew that there was something missing, something wrong with him. He’d thought that he couldn’t be Ben Solo but maybe he can't be Kylo Ren either. Maybe he can't be anyone, anywhere. 

Snoke always talked like the problem was his name, his family, the people who didn’t respect him, the state of the galaxy, his own disobedience.

But Snoke was a liar, and always was. 

The problem was always himself. 

Kyl- Be- he slumps on the floor, an arm over his eyes, until he passes out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content notes: kylo is in a breakdown, kylo sets himself on fire again, depression, disassociation, self harm, institutional abuse, discussion of... brain manipulation i suppose I can call it, discussion of slave trackers/implanted tracking devices, eroticized death fantasties
> 
> Ren is not having a good time


	8. Chapter 8

Finn wakes feeling like he’s run a dozen drills. He hopes, vaguely, that he hasn’t been shouting in his sleep. He’s distantly grateful that Rey isn’t on base, hopefully too far away to feel any of his emotions.

He dresses, decision already half made, and walks in the direction of General Organa’s office.

Poe meets him coming the other way. “Hey, buddy, General wants to talk to -” Finn nods, unsurprised. He’s not sure he would feel surprised by anything, right now. “....Force stuff?” Poe hazards.

“Probably.” Finn starts to walk past, towards his inevitable fate, but Poe grabs his arm.

“Hey, man,” Finn blinks at him, and maybe Poe’s expression means something but Finn can’t read it, and he’s too tired to check the Force. “You need anything from me, let me know, okay? I’ve got your back.”

Instincts war for a moment. Finn is swallowed up by the desire to hide and the knowledge that no apology could match the enormity of what Poe offers. He doesn’t know what to say, so he says nothing.

Poe squeezes, once, and lets go.

General Organa nods to him as he walks in. He sits down.

“Finn. What happened?”

Finn stares down at his hands. They’re shaking slightly. He clenches his fists and barely feels it. “I’ve been having - I thought they were dreams. I don’t think so anymore.”

General Organa listens. Finn stares down at his hands and talks about the dreams, the fog. The images in the smoke. The nightmares not his own. Ren.

“He said the Force had linked us. He - offered me Phasma’s position, said something about letting me run the program however I wanted.”

“Did you take it?” It’s the first thing she’s said in some time. Finn shakes his head. He’s still staring down at his hands.

“No, I - maybe I should have, taken the Order down from the inside, but-” He swallows. He’s tugging on a loose thread in his jacket, he notices, and stops. He lays his hands on his knees.

“Why didn’t you?” He can’t tell her tone of voice, and isn’t brave enough to check in the Force. Everything is a haze of static and white noise.

“I’m not going to…. become her.” He nods, mostly to himself. “Even if it wins the war.”

He’s not sure what he’s said makes any sense to her. It sounds too much like the way Ren talks, or the way they talk to each other – some strange code that only the two of them understand. But when he looks up, she’s smiling, very faintly. Suddenly he remembers what she said, when he asked her to rewrite his mind. He looks down again.

“I should have told you the first time it happened.”

“Yes, you should have.” Finn takes a breath and waits for his punishment. “If you experience such dreams in the future, or any other contact from Ren, inform me immediately. You are dismissed.”

Finn blinks. Is he - General Organa raises her eyebrows at him, so he gets up, salutes, and leaves.

Poe is waiting for him in the hallway, and Finn can’t understand his expression. He feels separate from the world, exhausted and numb, in a way even a simulation wouldn’t cause. He should say something to Poe, but even a greeting feels out of reach.

“Hey, man. Have you eaten yet?” Finn shakes his head. “Me neither. Come on, let’s grab something.”

They get food and sit down. Poe keeps a conversation running without much input from Finn. Finn eats mechanically, without registering tastes, habitually quick, like he’s -

Finn shakes his head to drag himself back. He’s not on the Finalizer.

He’s so tired of this.

“Hey.” Finn looks up. Poe is smiling at him, and Finn has no idea how much time has passed. “What’d the General need?”

Finn doesn’t want to explain. He doesn’t think he has the words. But he’s - he’s going to be better. Whatever ‘better’ means.

Finn swallows.

“...You remember, when I asked Kylo Ren?” Poe goes still. Emotions light up in the Force, concern and something Finn can’t identify. Before Poe can respond, Finn continues - “I’ve been dreaming about him. With him,” he amends.

Poe twists his fork in his hands, tracing a pattern out on the table. “Like what happened with Rey?” Poe says. Emotions are flaring inside of his head, but Finn can’t tell what they are, too distant from any sensation.

“Kind of.”

Poe puts down his fork and picks up his spoon. His fingers are tight. “Did he threaten you, or -”

Finn shakes his head. “He - offered me Phasma’s job, actually. I said no,” He adds, not sure if he needs to specify.

Poe nods, looking down at his hands.

“...We grew up together, you know? Back when he was Ben.” Finn blinks and lets Poe talk. “I mean, not best friends, but my mom worked with his mom a lot, so me and Ben hung out a lot.” Poe tosses the spoon up and catches it. “I can’t think about Ren without thinking about the kid he used to be, so I try not to, you know?” He shakes his head. “Anyway.” He gestures with the spoon in a vague wave. “That’s why I didn’t want to talk about him, before. I’m – glad he didn’t hurt you.”

The two of them are quiet for a moment. Finn’s chopsticks scrape across his plate.

“....I was the only one in my squad to leave the Order.” Finn finally says. Poe looks up. “Slip died on Jakku, and Zeros on Tadonka, and as far as I know Nines is still there.” Finn shrugs one shoulder. “I get it.”

Poe smiles, a strangely shaped half thing. “Thanks, man.” He gestures at Finn’s half eaten meal with his spoon. “Now finish your breakfast.”

Finn sits on his bunk during his off time, rubbing the inside of his arm as he thinks.

He... isn't okay. He....

Alone in his room, no one’s mind overlapping his own, he tries to think it through it logically.

He takes a deep breath, and lets it out. He isn't okay. That isn't new. What is new is the certainty that he can no longer force himself to act functional when he isn't. Like a jammed blaster, he thinks, or a stressed metal strut. Pretending the problem isn’t there just makes it worse.

What the Order does - hurts people. That isn't a question. Finn is not okay. He refused Ren's offer because it would mean doing to others what was done to him. Because it isn't that he was too weak to take it. Anyone would suffer and no one deserves it. No one should go through that.

He thinks of Ren, almost without meaning to. He thinks of the arrogance, the insistence - this is who I am, this is what I want, no compromise and no backing down. There's an appeal to it, he decides. Ren doesn't care if he hurts people. And Finn can understand that, almost envies it. He remembers the scrambling fear, the need to get away with Rey and not caring who suffered for it.

Finn doesn't want to be like Ren, destroying everything for his own sake. But he doesn’t want to be what the Order wanted him to be, either, destroying himself for other people.

The Resistance, the Rebellion - Rey and Rose and Poe, and General Organa - they don't want him to destroy himself. Or at least they say so, and he believes them.

Balance, he thinks. He isn't sure where the fulcrum is, if there is a place where he can avoid hurting others and not be hurt himself.

But right now, he wants to try, to find out if it's possible.

He nods to himself, once. He'll talk to Rey when she gets back.

Rey comes back with a half complete lightsaber and a chunk of kyber crystal that rings in the Force and makes Finn’s teeth ache. She makes her report to General Organa and then finds Finn in his room.

Finn stares at her, and everything he'd planned to her about his dreams and about Ren sort of - evaporates, partially because it's Rey and she's smiling at him, and partially because he can feel the chunk of crystal in her pocket and it's - loud, or bright, or some description for what it feels like to be Noticeable in the Force.

"Hi." She pulls out the crystal and holds it out to him. It's green and it makes Finn's fingers tingle when he takes it. "When I was looking for crystals for my lightsaber, I found a set of two." She holds up her half completed lightsaber, and Finn can feel a matching echo from the crystal inside of it. "I only need one in my lightsaber, so you can have the other one."

Finn stares down at the crystal, and closes his hands around it. It's warm.

Rey settles on the bunk next to him, and leans into his shoulder. "I know you don't have a lightsaber, and I don't know if you're going to need one," she frowns, and Finn feels her touching the Force very briefly. "But I - think that one is yours. I want you to have it," she amends. "So that I know that -"

Here she turns, and wraps her hands around his, still holding the crystal. "I think the crystal I kept and this one were the same crystal, once? Or they grew together, and now -"

"They echo." Finn says, nodding. "I can feel it."

"Yeah. And I just - it was hard, leaving you to go to Luke and it's hard to leave you every time, and I think I can always feel you through the Force, but -"

Finn can imagine it, and maybe it's a vision of sorts - Rey touching her saber and feeling where Finn holds his crystal. He nods.

"I mean, you don't have to -"

"I want to." Finn smiles at her. Rey grins back, and then hugs him.

In that moment, Finn can't bear to tell her everything he needs to. He's trying to be better, but -

"Finn?" Rey's concerned now. Finn swallows.

"I - later." He compromises with himself. Not now, but soon. "I'll tell you - tomorrow," he says.

Maybe that's too much. Maybe he's - but Rey nods, and settles against his arms again.

The next day Rey spends all day in meditation and running drills with Poe - apparently some troopers want to become pilots, and Poe is trying to come up with a training program for them. Finn has already promised to take a look when it's ready.

Finn, meanwhile, spends the day helping Rose organize supply runs to trooper outposts. He keeps touching the pocket where he's keeping the green crystal - he didn't want to leave it in his room, but he feels awkward just keeping it in his pocket. He's not sure if it's dangerous or just disrespectful. He thinks Rose might notice, but she doesn't say anything.

That night, Rey comes to his room and leans against him in his bunk, her hands busy with a small mechanical object, Finn isn’t sure what.

He knows he should tell her, but he doesn’t know how to start, or where, or -

“You were having Force Dreams?” Finn stiffens. She jerks up and turns, grabbing his arm. “General Organa didn’t say, just - Poe said you had a Force thing, and asked about it because he assumed I already knew, and I remembered that you had kept me out of your dreams, and I - guessed, I guess.” Her nose scrunches at the repetitive phrasing. “I mean. You don’t have to tell me everything, but.” He senses her frustration and for a blinding moment he’s not sure if it’s at him or not. “This isn’t coming out right. It’s just - you don’t have to hide anything from me.”

Finn looks away. His hands curl on his legs.

“...I thought I did.” He feels Rey shift, but he thinks if he looks over he won’t be able to keep talking. “I thought - I didn’t think it was the Force. I thought I was going crazy, and that if you knew how much of a liability I was you wouldn’t want me to stay.”

“Or that - look, in the Order, if you had something like this happening, it meant you were defective and not fit to serve. What you were supposed to do was turn yourself into the officers and let them fix you.”

“Reconditioning,” Rey whispers. Finn nods. He’s not sure how much she’s picked up, but maybe it doesn’t matter. 

“And if someone in your squad told you they were experiencing this, you would turn them in. If you cared about them and wanted them to be okay you would turn them in. And if you didn’t and someone found out you’d be turned in too.” He swallows. “I didn’t want to put you in that position.”

Rey is staring at him, he can tell and he - he wants to run, but -

“...The rebellion wouldn’t -”

“I know!” It comes out too loud, too angry. “I know that now, then I - thought that was just how armies worked, okay? It didn’t occur to me that it would be any different.”

He swallows. His hands are shaking. This - this isn’t okay, he said he was going to be better -

Rey curls her hand around his.

“...I think even when you know things are better, you don’t believe it, for a while.” Rey rubs her thumb over his can’t tell if it’s for his sake or his. “I - no matter how many times people tell me they won’t get of me, I still kinda think - that if I’m not useful enough, or-”

Finn grabs her hand. “Yeah.” It’s not enough for everything he’s feeling, all the emotion bursting in his chest, but she smiles at him, so he thinks she understands.

They sit in silence for a bit, and Rey fiddles with her machinery. Looking at it again, Finn thinks it might just exist for fiddling with. 

“What were your dreams about? If you wanna tell me.”

Finn looks away, awkward. “That was - the other reason I didn’t want to tell anyone.” Even now, he’s not sure how she’ll react - understanding or betrayal. General Organa’s understanding bolsters him, but - Rey.

Finn take a deep breath. “They were - look, I’ve already talked to General Organa about it, okay?” Rey frowns, concerned, and Finn doesn’t know how to do - “Let me show you, okay?”

Rey nods, and Finn tries to reach out the way Rey did before. He shows her the fog and the blurring. He feels her alarm at Ren but if he focuses on that he won’t be able to keep going, so he doesn’t - he shows her the visions in the fog, and then -

-If he were better at this, he thinks, he would be able to do this like a proper report, facts and pictures divorced from emotion. But instead his feelings leak out like oxygen from a badly sealed ship - the fear when he woke up that he had become a liability and everyone knew, the guilty sympathy for Ren, the knowledge that he doesn’t hate the way he’s supposed to; the dreams, the echoes, the knowledge that he’d found something in common with Ren -

-And then the fog once more, the offer and the refusal.

Finn pulls out of Rey’s mind and he can’t understand her expression.

“I -” Rey shakes her head and goes silent for a long time.

"I know you hate him-" Finn starts, but Rey waves a hand.

"It's - more complicated than that. And it doesn't matter. We still have to stop the Order, but -"

She huffs. It sounds vaguely annoyed, and somehow it’s charming. “Words are hard. So are feelings.” Finn laughs a little bit. “But I’m not mad at you for not hating him, if that helps.”

“....Thanks.” He kisses her hair, and isn’t forced at all. It’s not sex, and he’s not doing it because he’s supposed to, it’s just – she’s important, and precious, and it’s too big for words, but this works.

Finn tugs on a strand of hair when he’s alone one night, feeling the spring as it goes back to position.

It's a part of him, he thinks. His body.

My life is my own, he thinks.

"Hey, what's that?"

Finn freezes, his fingers clenching around the crystal. He hadn't noticed Rose approaching.

Finn swallows and ignores his first instinct to hide it, and holds up the Kyber crystal up instead. He's still carrying it around in his pocket.

"Kyber crystal." Rose looks at it closely, fascinated. "Rey wanted me to have the other one she found," he adds, and then feels guilty for.

He figured out, eventually, what Rose had been trying to say when she kissed him. Why she had apologized for doing it, later. But there doesn't seem to be any way he can make up for - not being what she had hoped for.

But Rose just smiles at him and makes a cooing noise. "Oh, that's so romantic!" Finn feels his cheeks heat. "Are you going to build a lightsaber too?"

Finn shakes his head. "No, Rey and I don't think I'm gonna need one." He rubs his thumb over the edges of the crystal, thinking. "I want to keep it with me, but I havn't figured out how, excpet for just keeping it shoved in a pocket..."

Rose narrows her eyes for a second, and Finn can see the rough shape of her thoughts tumbling around - something about knots? Rose pats her pockets down, and pulls out a spool of thin wire.

"Can I see that for a second?" Confused, Finn hands the crystal over. Rose closes her fingers over the crystal for a moment, and then holds a little bit of unspooled wire up to the surface. Then she hands the crystal back. "I think I have an idea, gimme a couple of hours."

Bemused, Finn watches Rose dash off.

A few hours later, still feeling a bit vaugely guilty, Finn goes over to Rose's workstation.

"Oh, hi!" Rose smiles up at him. "I was just gonna message you." Her hands are moving rapidly, but Finn can't tell what she's doing. "Can I see the crystal again?"

Finn hands it over, and thinks of not saying what he came here to say, but - Rose deserves it.

"Here, but, Rose, I wanted to -" Her hands continue to move, wrapping wires around themselves. "Um."

"Keep talking, I can listen while I work." She glances up at him. "Something wrong?"

Finn sits down on a pile of boxes nearby. "I just wanted to - when you apologized for kissing me? I... didn't really understand what you meant. How you felt about me." He thinks she's staring at him, but this is easier if he doesn't look over at her. "I...I think I hurt you," he finally says. "I'm sorry for that."

Silence for a moment. Then -

Rose is laughing.

"Um?"

She looks up at him, one hand over her face to muffle her giggles, and the affection she's feeling hits him in the chest.

"You're a sweetheart. But it's okay. /We're/ okay." Finn relaxes, a little. "Yes, I had a crush on you. But honestly, it was mostly that I was lonely without Paige. You and Rey are good together, and I'm glad you're my friend."

Finn smiles. "Okay. I'm - really glad you're my friend, too."

Rose smiles back at him, and goes back to work. After a moment, she pauses again and looks up at him.

“And like. You know it wasn’t your fault, right?” He stares at her. She shifts in her chair to face him. “Like, I had emotions, and they sucked, but it’s – not your fault that you didn’t have the feelings I was hoping you did.” She frowns. “That made more sense in my head. But you’re not responsible for other people’s emotions, unless you go out of your way to manipulate them, right? And you definitely weren’t. So it’s not your fault.” Finn eventually nods. “Good.”

Rose turns back to her work. After a few more minutes, Rose makes a satisfied noise, and holds up the crystal.

The green crystal is now wrapped in a lattice of copper wire, flush to the surface of the crystal.

"I don't think this metal will react with the kyber, but if you notice anything or if there's a weird energy build up or - oh, right!" Another flurry of movement and a cord is threaded through a sturdy hoop on one end. "There." She holds it up.

A necklace.

"....that's perfect." Finn takes the necklace, and puts it on, tucking the crystal safely beneath his shirt.

Finn dreams of fire, this time, searing the inside of his skin. He dreams of being pulled open, his internal organs exposed and inspected and discarded. He dreams of emptiness, and of fear, and a whispering blackness coating the inside of his lungs.

He wakes, blinking, Rey shifting next to him.

“What was -” Rey mumbles, half into his hair. “That was -”

Finn’s nightmares are of white on white, being chased, memory wiped like a droid. This was –

“Yeah. I know.”

Finn finds a quiet spot in the base, grounding himself in the shift of the sand underneath his feet and the emptiness of the desert around them. It had been a bad morning, with nightmares that he wasn’t sure were his or Ren’s: his body no longer being his control and someone one else speaking with his voice. He tastes rust and salt, and tries to breathe through it.

The quiet helps. It helps right up to the point where Rey finds him and settles against the wall next to him. Finn feels tension start to form in his shoulders and hates it.

“You don’t have to hide, you know.” Rey starts, looking down. “You can come to me for help.”

Finn's hands tighten on the edge of his jacket. He swallows, trying to find the words.

'Take what you are owed,' he thinks, and almost laughs.

"Sometimes I want-" He shakes his head, starts over. "Sometimes it helps if I can feel like no can see me. It feels... safer, than if someone is there with me."

"Do I count as someone?"

"You're the most important someone."

Rey smiles, but then looks down again. She fidgets with something metallic - a fuse, he thinks. She takes a deep breath, and Finn is pierced with the fear that this is it, this is when he's too much trouble, this is the limit that's too much -

"I don't get it." Finn draws in a sharp breath. Rey looks up and she's still smiling and she doesn't look like she's about to - "Let me finish." Finn nods. "....I'm really scared of being alone, of being left behind and no one looking for me."

Finn opens his mouth to reassure her, but she squeezes his hand, and he lets her finish.

"But - I guess, I don't have to get it, I don't think? If it helps you sometimes, it doesn't have to make any sense to me. You've done so much to help me, even though it's been hard for you. If this helps you, I'll help." She looks up at him, and her smile is fragile, a crack in a vid screen. "Just... promise me you'll always come back?"

"Yes, of course, I promise." He leans into her space and she pulls him close, wrapping her arms around him. "Always."

Calrissian has several Stormtrooper processing stations, set up just on the inside of Order Space. So the Falcon is running the border, trading supplies for the station for new recruits. Border running never gets easier, no matter how many times they do it.

Tension crawls up Finn's spine as they approach the security sweeps. For a long second, he’s swallowed by the fear of being caught, of being seen, everyone on the ship being captured and -

He tries to take a deep breath. He grounds himself in the Force, in the glow of lives around him, Rey's shining light and Poe's soft warmth and the Falcon like a living thing. He closes his eyes and tries what he's done before, on a smaller scale - don't notice us, we're a normal ship, just ignore us...

He holds it, as best he can, until the sweep passes and they’re in the clear. He lets it go, and - oh, there's all the fear he had pushed aside before, all of the terror and adrenaline. His chest hurts like something is trying to claw its way out, and he's not sure he can breathe.

"Wow, Finn, that was really cool!" Rey bounds up, but stops short just before hugging him. He's not sure what she sees, but she smiles at him. “Go sit in the cabin. I’ll poke you with the Force in twenty minutes, okay?”

He manages half of a smile. "-thanks." He goes, and locks the door behind him.

After fifteen minutes, he comes back, and grabs Rey’s hand.

Finn had been worried, somewhere deep inside his head, that processing was a cover for something, that the better life he had inspired them to seek didn’t exist. He didn’t think General Organa would do that, but - he wasn’t sure.

But Spitz meets them at the docking bay, and her and Nova shows them around, both of them hale and healthy, and as they walk around the base, something in Finn’s stomach relaxes.

Nothing in the station is white on white, the walls all explosions of color, and nothing is chrome either.

“I really like your hair!” Spitz tells Rey, half way through the tour. Spitz tugs on her own hair, a few inches long and bright red. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do with mine when it gets that long…”

Finn’s not the only one who isn’t sure, it looks like. Rey is about respond, but then they pass the area where the interviews take place and Finn pauses. He isn’t sure why he’s there, but there’s an alert on the inside of his mind that tells him to stop, and listen.

Suddenly, there’s a commotion inside. Finn opens the door with the Force and - the interview is going badly, the trooper is -

“How am I supposed to know this isn’t just another sim?”

Oh.

Finn steps into the trooper’s space, staying his line of sight. He doesn't have a plan, and part of his mind is shrieking that he's just going to make things worse - but he recognizes this, he knows how this feels. It's the same spike of empathy that made him seek out Ren, he thinks, the same one that drove him to help Slip and hold him as he died.

The trooper - Digger, Finn reads out of the Force - stares at him, eyes wide. Finn doesn't hesitate, pulling off his glove with his teeth and grabbing Digger's hand, squeezing.

"They never got the haptic feedback right, remember?" Finn is talking quickly, too quickly, but Digger is listening. "We weren't supposed to take our gloves off, so they never put in skin contact."

Digger stares down at their joined hands. He swallows, takes a shaking breath and then another.

"I, I keep seeing things that aren't -" He starts, his hand shaking but not pulling back. "I was in recon for so long and I still don't know why they pulled me out, I'm not fixed, I - maybe they didn't, maybe I'm still." Another heaving breath. "I'm no good as a trooper, you should space me, it would be-”

Finn squeezes his hand.

"I still see Phasma in every crowd," he whispers. It feels like a confession he shouldn't make except that he has to. "I killed her and I still expect to see her every time." He squeezes again. "We can make it work, okay? You don't have to stay, but, we’re not gonna get rid of you."

Digger's eyes focus on him. "...You're Finn." He says, as if that’s a revelation.

Finn shrugs. “Yeah.” He lets go, finally. “You okay?” Digger swallows, and nods. Finn puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes. “Let me know what you choose. Nova has my comm.”

Digger nods again. His mind is still flashing, analyzing every aspect of what’s going on, tearing apart every potential inconsistency. It’s not hard to imagine how he got his name.

The trooper who started the interview shuffles closer, and Finn takes a step back. Finn doesn’t know Digger will be okay. But he’s okay right now, and maybe that’s enough.

The trip back to base is quiet, and easy. Poe pilots while Rey leans against Finn’s shoulder. 

He doesn’t even know what he’s reacting to. He doesn’t even know, just that his mind is hyper aware now, sweeping out for threats -

Maybe it’s several things. A flicker of chrome out of the corner of his eye, someone watching him a little too closely, someone talking too loudly about the effect of memory wipes on droids, someone else laughing about “decomissioning” people, the first nightmare in weeks of being chased and unable to escape -

Finn leaves the cafeteria and - he ends up somewhere in the base, somewhere quiet and isolated where he can choke on his guilt unobserved. He’s still not good enough, he’s still -

It isn’t Rey who finds him, this time. This time, it’s General Organa, her hair tied back and her gaze steely.

Finn isn’t sure what to say. An apology for still being broken, maybe. But before he can manage it, the General slowly sits down on the ground next to him.

“These things take time, you know.” He blinks. She’s staring off, middle distance. “It’s been four decades and I still wake up crying for my parents sometimes.” Alderaan, he thinks. “After the first war it took me years to stop checking the exits every time I walked into a room. There are veterans who never stopped carrying sidearms or making sure they had lines of sight open. We kept those habits because of the years that us alive.”

General Organa meets his eyes and Finn knows, suddenly, that she does not see him as a burden or a broken droid, but a fellow soldier. Maybe not equal in rank, but respected nonetheless.

“Your experiences aren’t quite the same, I know. But you did what you did and learned what you learned because it was that or death. Now you have to unlearn it, and that takes time. All habits do.”

Finn has a bubble of emotion in his chest. “Little different than forgetting to put tools away.”

The General smirks. “Is it, though?”

Finn stands, brushing dust off his pants. He hesitates, unsure -

“If you’re offering a hand up, I’ll take it.”

Finn smiles, and offers his hand.

“....thank you, Sir.”

The general quirks a smile, and doesn’t mention it. 

Finn wakes up slowly, something tugging on his brain. Rey snuffles into his side, and then she's awake too. She just – comes to his room, even when he hasn’t had nightmares in a while, and he’s realized that maybe she’s looking for reassurance, too, that he’s still there.

"There's..." She waves a hand vaguely. "Not a threat, but I can't..."

"Rose is awake," Finn mumbles. He narrows his eyes, focusing on the alert he's getting. "Not in danger, but -" He squirms, starting to get up. "I'm gonna..."

Rey nods and shifts, sitting up in the bunk. "Yeah, I'll come too."

Yawning and rubbing their eyes, the two of them follow the tugs on their mind to the shipyard.

Rose pulls herself out a speeder's guts and stares up at them. "Hey." She waves, and then her expression drops. "Oh no, did I wake you guys up?"

Finn waves a hand, trying to dismiss the worry. "It's okay. What's wrong?"

Rose wipes her hands on her pants. "It's silly, really." Finn settles on the stone floor next to her, and Rey takes up a spot on the other side. Rose smiles weakly at them both. "...sometimes, next to you guys, I feel useless."

Finn stares at her, upset. Rose looks down and her words come quickly.

"You guys have the Force, and Finn you know all about the Order, and Rey you can fix ships even better than I can and -" Rose looks up again before they can interrupt. "I know, I know! It's just - sometimes there are bad days, you know?"

Finn nods, slowly. "Yeah." He nudges her shoulder with his. "I mean - I've learned a lot from you." She blinks at him. He rubs the back of his head awkwardly. "I was ready to run when I woke up, remember? It wasn't until after I met you that..." Finn frowns as he tries to form the words. "that the Order was something that could be fought. And even if it wasn't, it was important to try."

Rose stares at him, but he can feel her emotions blooming in the force, the disbelieving pride.

Finn rubs his crystal through his shirt. "...sometimes I still want to run, a bit." He confesses. "Not really, but..." He shrugs one shoulder. "Sometimes there are bad days."

Rose leans into his shoulder. "Yeah."

Rey pokes Finn in the shoulder. “You know you – could. If you really needed to.” He knows what she means. She’d be okay without him, he thinks.

“…Yeah,” he says. “But I’m gonna stay.”

Poe is deep in thought when he wanders into the shipyard, joining Finn on the bench. He's uncharacteristically quiet.

"Hey, man." Poe starts. Finn can't tell what his face means, and his emotions are hard to name. "When I asked about reconditioning. I decided you meant it was like retraining, right?" Finn feels the reflected desire for something to fidget with. Maybe it’s a pilot thing. "The kinda stuff I did a dozen times in the academy, like what the General put through after the stunt I pulled on the evac ship. A week of sitting in a desk and being talked at." Poe looks over and his expression is still impossible to read. "....It's not like that, is it."

Finn looks down, not sure why Poe's expression is hard to bear.

"Yeah. I talked to General Organa about it and - yeah, you guys... don't do that, here."

Poe nods, biting his lips. He's silent for a long moment, and Finn can see his thoughts shifting around, but can't tell what they are.

"....I'm glad you got out," Poe finally says.

Finn nods. "Yeah. Me too."

Finn’s fingers hesitate over the lock on his door, and – for the first time, locks it.

His mind is his own. 

His life is his own.

His body?

Finn isn't sure. He isn't. But - he wants it to be his. He wants to own the body he lives in. He's not sure how separate it is from the other two, anyway.

He thinks about Ren, taking up space, claiming what he thinks he deserves with no fear for the consequences. Spitz, her hair styled differently in every holo call. Calrissian, his hair so much like his own.

He's touching the Force before he consciously thinks of it, tugging and snipping in silence, operating by two different kinds of touch.

When he's done, he tugs on a strand, feels the new length, and smiles.

Spitz blinks up at Finn from the bottom of the Falcon's gangplank. She looks good, he notices with a wash of relief, her posture relaxed and her hair growing out red and smooth.

"...We were just about to message you."

Finn shrugs. "I had a feeling and asked Rey to make a detour on our way back to base. Is something wrong?"

Spitz tugs on a piece of hair hanging in front of her face. "No, just....Come with me." She turns and gestures for them to follow and Finn does, Rey a little behind him. "You know how sometimes people will be fighting and then troopers will realize we're the Rebellion and surrender so they can join up?" Finn nods. It had been happening more and more lately. Apparently the treatment of stormtroopers had become even harsher. "Well, sometimes not /everyone/ on the field wants to surrender but get overruled, or in this case, get knocked out and -"

Finn stops in the corridor. Finn has stopped, staring at a door in silence, his mental vidscreen lighting up with something he hadn't realized he recognized until he saw it again. The sensation is like the grip of his old side arm, the steady embrace of his armor. A familiar stability that calls up something between relief and nausea.

Spitz nods, gesturing to the door. "Yeah. We figured we should. Yeah."

Finn swallows. "Thank you. I'll..." He nods. He glances back at Rey, who smiles at him. She sends an image - her still being there when he comes out. He smiles back, and turns to the door. "Okay."

The door slides open at Spitz' gesture, and Finn goes in.

“Nines.”

“Traitor.”

Finn nods. Accurate enough. Information runs across the surface of his mind, flickers of white on white. Finn tenses, and then just stands across from his old squad mate. Nines’ shoulders are stiff, fists clenched as he paces in the small room. Even his face is glaring. Finn can’t tell what he himself is feeling. He doesn’t know what to say. What can he say?

“How dare you come to face me.” Nines spits, “Do you know what they /did/ to us because of you?” There is a memory, an image, white on white on white. Fear and guilt and he can’t tell if it’s his own or Nines’. “Do you know what I had to -”

“I’m sorry.” Nines stops short. Finn can’t tell what Nines’ mind is doing. Too much processing power is set on keeping himself present, on keeping his breathing steady. His throat feels tight, like he’s being choked, but there’s nothing around his neck and it’s just him and Nines here.

“I’m sorry. I had to get out. I couldn’t stay. Not after Slip died. Not after I realized how disposable we are to them.” Finn swallows. His throat is still tight. “I’m sorry. I would have asked you to come with me if I’d thought you might have said yes.”

Silence. Nines looks away first. Finn doesn’t dare check his mind – reads his body instead, the half degree lowering of his shoulders and the tense and release of his hands.

“….I’m not going to fight for the Rebellion.”

“Okay.” Nines jerks his head back. “A lot of troopers don’t. They just want a life of their own. No one fights here unless they want to.” Finn waves a hand. “There’s talk of a resettlement program, but there’s not a lot we can do while the Order has the retrieval orders out. Nova knows more.” 

“And if I wanted to go back?”

“They’ll interrogate you and then kill you.” The Order had made its policy clear. If you leave you don’t get to come back. “I won’t stop you from going. But…. I’d rather you stayed. So I would know that you hadn’t gotten shot and spaced with the waste products.”

Nines lets out a breath and looks away again. Finn nods, turns to leave.

Rey is waiting for him outside and pushes off of the wall as soon as he leaves the holding room. This time, he doesn’t hesitate and wraps his arms around her, leaning into her shoulder.

They don’t talk, and that’s… nice. Support and warmth and the stability of rock beneath his feet.

Rose and Rey work together, trading tools and ideas as the climb over the ship. Finn thinks he can see what they’re doing, now, that he’s absorbed enough knowledge to understand the process.

It’s never going to be the ship it was before it crashed. Finn can see the patches, the place where Rey had to add a support strut to compensate for old damage and where Rose came up with a unique wiring plan to work around it; the places where new material had to be patched in because there was nothing under the rust. It’s never going to fly the same. It will always be something rebuilt.

But that doesn’t make it worthless.

Finn might be able to accept that, he thinks.

Rey waves a hand at him, not looking up from her welding. He glances around the shop, finds the tool she needs, and walks over to hand it to her. She takes it from his hand without looking up longer than to flash a smile at him, and he finds himself smiling back.

It’ll never fly the same again. But it’ll fly.

Finn locks his bedroom door, the action still novel, and gets ready for bed. As he starts to drift off - there is something that he’s starting to recognize, a variation in the Force that is familiar.

An echo. A reflection that is out of sync.

Finn thinks - he can choose to turn away, this time. He can get up, ignore the ring in his mind and wait for it to fade. He could even sleep, and still not slip into a place he does not want to go, besides nightmares.

He could.

Finn takes a deep breath, touches the kyber crystal against his chest, and follows the Force.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> content notes: flashbacks, discussion of hallucinations, discussion of trauma, uncomfortable conversations that nonetheless needed to happen


	9. Chapter 9

The man wakes and is caught up in the swells and the dips of that great infinity, the back and forth against the boundary conditions of the universe. Each moment is an echo and a new creation, formed from everything that has come before and making something entirely new from it.

He opens his eyes, and sets his feet on solid ground. He is aware, the universe observing itself, an mind in and of itself and yet not apart, unique and yet reflected; each spark of life its own creation but touched by every other. 

The two men notice one another, a life among so many other lives, a resonance. One man approaches; the other does not.

Kylo Ren sits on the vaguely defined ground, fog swirling around him, staring at his own knees. His eyes flick up to Finn and then back down again.

Silence lingers for a long moment.

"...Snoke is gone." Ren whispers into the silence. "He's... he's really gone. This whole time, he was gone." Finn opens his mouth but then closes it again. Ren clutches at his own hair, seeking pain to ground him, his voice cracking and scrambling like a broken audio feed. "If he's gone -" Ren swallows. Suddenly, he smells snow and blood; suddenly, he tastes salt and plasmafire. "If he's gone then /why am I still like this?/"

Finn says nothing. Ren hates him, a bit, hates whatever light inside of his soul that survived, whatever part of Finn that was still able to say no. Ren hates that Finn found a way to do what he could not and become more than he was built to be, this toy soldier who grew a heart.

But there was no soil fit for new growth inside of Kylo Ren, no space for tender shoots of personhood to take root. Salted ground, he thinks, and buries his head in his crossed arms to muffle the noise he makes. Sobbing or laughter. He’s not sure it matters which.

A thump. Probably Finn walking away. Ren doesn’t look up.

“I’m still scared all of the time.” Ren jerks his head up. Finn is sitting next to him, staring into the fog. “I know Phasma is dead, but sometimes I’m sure that she’s alive and tracking me, that anyone in a crowd tall enough is her and she’s found me and she’s going to drag me back. Sometimes I feel like I'm still in a weird Sim and I never escaped.“ He shakes his head. His hair is growing out, Ren notices absently. “I – I don’t know how not to be afraid all of the time. Or just... how to - be a person, I guess.”

Finn tilts his head back, and for a moment he thinks back to the last time he and Ren met, and all that he’d done since. He’s - he’s doing better, he realizes, like a blaster bolt to his chest. He’s not okay, not by any stretch of imagination, but - he’s doing better.

“But I think I’m learning,” he says into the silence. “I – think it’s something that /can/ be learned.”

Ren stares off into the distance. “...maybe.”

It’s not a denial. It’s progress, and Finn is learning to accept that as enough. It’s enough, that the averages start to trend upward - that slowly the good days start to outnumber the bad ones. It's enough to be rebuilding, he thinks, even if the rebuilding is never finished. And even if he never gets any better than right now, he thinks, he’ll still have Rey and Rose and Poe. They can make it work, he decides.

"You know," Finn says after a moment, "The things you said, before. About owning your own life and taking what is owed. That - helped me figure things out. I'm still not gonna join you, but. Thanks."

Finn looks up, and Ren is staring at him, eyes wide, expression impossible to read. Surprise, he thinks. After a moment, Ren looks back down at his knees.

"...You made me see things I needed to see." Ren says, nodding into his knees. He looks over to Finn, and nods again before looking back at the fog.

"You're welcome. I think." Kylo’s shoulders shift, almost like laughter, but no noise comes out.

Quiet forms between them, both watching the gentle twists of the fog around them.

“....did you ever figure out what this place was?” Finn says, into the silence.

Ren rubs the heel of his boot against the indistinct ground. “...There are places,” he starts. It does not sound as arrogant as before, though there is still a touch of the lecture to it. “Chambers of trial. The Jedi used them for training.” He shrugs. “I don’t know if Luke ever found any of the other ones, but there was one on Dagoba. But he told us about it.

“‘There is nothing within but what we take in with us,’” Ren says, and it sounds like a quote. Finn nods, slowly. Ren gestures to the fog around them. “...Usually they’re a. Physical location, and you go there on purpose, but.”

Finn can’t help but smile, just a little bit. “All things are possible in the Force?” He hazards, and it makes Kylo snort.

The two sit in calm silence, in this place that is infinite and private. No more words are said – perhaps no more are required.

Again, the fog; again, all of the galaxy swelling and subsiding and carrying every scrap of awareness along with it. It is not light, and it is not dark, not good or evil: what it is is both more and less than any word used to describe it. It is the Force, and the Force is simply this - connection, with yourself and with infinity.

It is simply this: you are not alone, and through each other you learn yourself.

The two men watch the fog swirl around them, its embrace warm and soft. It will not last, but for now there is quiet, and peace, and for now is enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains the single line I have retained from the original, 2016 draft of this concept. Cookies to anyone who guesses which one it is. (or if you ask, I'll tell you, no big deal)
> 
> I have wanted to write this story for half a decade and now it is done
> 
> ....I... don't know what to do with myself, now. 
> 
> But I'll find out. Progress is important


End file.
